Wiretap

Det. Thomas "Herc" Hauk: Fucking white boys.... Dumb as a box of rocks.... I have much respect for black people after working with these idiots.... Seriously, if white boys want to sell drugs in Baltimore, they got to make different laws for it....

Det. Kashima "Kima" Greggs: Affirmative action?

From "Ebb Tide," year two, HBO's The Wire

AN EDITOR RECENTLY asked if I thought I had issues with whiteness – "self-hatred," she said. "Got five on that," I replied, drowning out the words "white guilt" and remembering 1995, when you heard the Luniz' "I Got Five on It" all the time, unless you were living on an all-Pavement diet. That wasn't my style, although some things – conversations about music with people who are older than 50, or with people who are younger than 50 – would be simpler if it was. It's difficult to defend my addiction to music these days, much less my 50-year-old, not 50 Cent, approach to hip-hop. And yeah, I've got issues with whiteness, in particular with white Americans who take the privileges that come with white skin for granted. To that I say let white guilt sweep the land like a plague.

Herc Hauk knows a box of rocks when he sees one, but give the brother his propers: during The Wire's first season, he pushed his IQ into double digits while chasing heroin dealers at a Baltimore housing project. He could have used a copy of "Are Black People Cooler than White People?," a piece by onetime Bay Guardian writer Donnell Alexander, whose book Ghetto Celebrity has just been published. Alexander spells out what thinking people everywhere already know: cool is "a black thang, baby." The Wire's first season – every episode – proved the point; it was the best that TV had to offer.

Meanwhile, The Wire's second season has moved from black to white, from dope to the docks. The cops are back; nearly everything else – plot, characters, and the unmistakable rhythms of class and race – is different. Season one focused on young drug dealers and a team of mostly outcast cops using court-ordered wiretaps on project pay phones. The collision between the law and the outlaws generated ever present tension and sudden explosive bursts of energy that shaped their lives day and night.

If season one was a high-wire act, season two presents jugglers and clowns. Gone are the tension, the energizing hip-hop beats, the kids too smart to waste time on impossible wishes. The longshoremen live with a mix of nostalgia, worry, and illusion, fallout from the vanishing American dream. Their children drift aimlessly, pissed off that the security they consider a birthright has yet to materialize. There's dissent in the Sobotka family, which, compared to the first season, in which 16-year-old Wallace – a sweet kid who sees too much and gets shot for his troubles – is the de facto head of a six-child family, seems tame. And you realize how infrequently the characters from the projects smiled.

This is not the working class romanced by Labor's Untold Story. It's what happens when post-WWII politics and prosperity fade. I witnessed the beginning of the end while working at Ford Motors in Milpitas, where in 1978 and '79 I endured 11 months and 16 days of supernatural tedium and hard work. I shared the pit – a sunken area beneath the line – with Rudy and Joe. We attached parts to cars rolling by overhead that would soon gather dust on Ford lots around the country. The duo's unique contribution to proletarian culture was an ability to mathematize the Ford experience, which they did with a proficiency and single-minded zeal that suggested autism. The theoretical underpinnings of their work involved a three-dimensional grid calibrating time, physical motion, and hourly pay scale, with numerical constants derived from standard of living, inflation, and wage averages since 1948. One day they calculated Rudy's after-tax assets in 1987 if both his children went to parochial school ("I dunno man," Rudy told Joe, "those nuns can be fucking evil"). They furnished their homes, bought cars, boats, and took vacations, sort of. It was wonderful, it was terrible, it was insane, and in the end, it was flawed. They escaped one line to be enslaved by others. Rudy, whose father was a farmworker, understood the spiritual price of materialism ("It's all just fucking stuff," he told me one day, throwing his wrench against a blue Ford compact). Still, it was the laws of motion that did them in, not math. We thought the line would run forever. Ford, which closed the plant in 1983, had other plans.

Rudy and Joe make a great story, but everyday exposure to their fantasy lives made me dream of death. The plight of Frank Sobotka and the longshoremen, and by implication, the American worker, is unfortunate, but whining as a first line of defense doesn't have much in the way of dignity. And his grown-up son Ziggy's goofball carelessness would be a luxury item in the projects. The Wire's first year matched talented black actors with good writing, and the results were spectacular. Is the second season a reckless rolling of the dice – risking greatness to find it again? – or did HBO flinch, unwilling to bet another season on a show driven by black characters? How the question is answered is an accurate measurement of the extent to which one needs illusion to survive. The characters of season one couldn't lose what they weren't given in the first place – anyone who condemns them for that should be chained to a box of white boys and tossed into the Chesapeake.