Low Winter Sun -- Another Form of Disaster Capitalism Looting Our Cities

What David Simon wrought -- not that he is to be blamed, for he burned with the holy fire of first-hand, personal outrage. With The Wire and Treme  He cared, he cares passionately, he cared, some might say too much. His templates have been taken over by others, who are not interested in the horror of corrupted morality but in all the sensationalism they can squeeze out of it, the cheap thrill of seeing people behave really badly without consequences -- the expected privilege of  ever-growing numbers -- because, why not?

A dark story in a city falling in on itself might present some audience problems, but Mr. Stillerman noted that the show was opening immediately following the final season premiere of “Breaking Bad,” which has thrived on exploring human pathology.

But now our cities destroyed by neglect and design are golden opportunities for looting and pillaging via showrunner career-building opportunism on all fronts, as this New York Times article on the AMC premiere of Low Winter Sun  * tell us, though perhaps not by design. In order that we don't miss the opportunism here, one of the characters is played by David Costabile, who was in the cast of both The Wire and Breaking Bad.  Additionally, a thug is played by Jay Ransone from The Wire's second season, and who also appeared in a season of Treme ( and Simon's Generation Kill too; at least the actors are getting work, even if the residents of the cities where the series are shot aren't. That's something.) This is about men doing bad things to each other. Surely they do bad things to women, children, animals and plants as well, but women and how they hold things together as best they can when the men don't bother will not be the focus. The focus is Men, choking within their claustrophobic manufactured atmosphere of testosterone poison.

The show is closely focused on Agnew and his partner, Joe Geddes (Lennie James), two homicide cops who commit that signature crime on a deeply crooked fellow detective and then spend time trying to unsolve the crime.

To be sure we don't miss this is about the baddest, meanest, ugliest men in a city, the article is titled "Broken Men, Broken Place."  Besides the adored Albuquerque's Breaking Bad, another recent television series example of this relentless miserable, masculine grey  bleakness of corruption which so often is mistaken for depth and gravity, was Chicago's Boss. One feels confident of what to expect without seeing it first. This isn't a comment on whether the series will be good bad or indifferent, just what the series is planned to be. 

There's no mistaking the relationship between what has happened in New Orleans, and continues to happen, with what is going on with Detroit, as this same New Orleans blogger describes here.  The 'best' of New Orleans is Disney World tacky faux -- the rest can go to hell until they get out and leave it all safe and easy for the corporate looters.  Even the schools and hospitals, ever our first targets in dismantling a decent culture and economy that serves the whole community, not merely the oligarchy of plutocrats.

But it's all service economy now: all the rest of us live to serve the rich, and are to be grated for it.  Mayor Billionaire didn't even bother to disguise telling us so.

"You know, the yelling and screaming about the rich - we want rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people," he said on his WOR-AM radio show.
"People say, 'Oh, well, you know, if the income were redistributed throughout the system more fairly,' " Bloomberg continued.
"I don't know what fair means. You can argue that if you make more money, you deserve more money."
Rich people generate jobs and taxes with the expensive things they buy and the fancy restaurants where they eat, Bloomberg said - but they aren't making much money as the stock market collapses, and raising taxes on them will just drive them away.

The stock market is having record profits, Mayor Mikey, and we all know it. But that's how much contempt you have for us: you lie to our faces and tell us to suck up your lies. You can't even quite control the laughing in our faces as you pronounced that the only jobs the rest of us can ever expect is servicing the wealthy for less than a living wage, while be taxed at a vastly higher rate, while receiving nothing in return in terms of education, health care or food and home.

Recall, how it was in the glorious days of the ancíen régime, when in France all work was in service to the wealthy, such as lace making (which was one of the businesses controlled by the king)?  You ruined your eyes and your general health, while malnourished and ill-housed, making the rivers of lace that festooned the aristocracy, lace you never wore for you could not afford decent food, much less the luxury product you created, and when you couldn't make it any longer, you were out of a job, left to your own devices to die hopefully sooner and quietly, rather than later, making another burden on the overburdened  malnourished country to dispose of a diseased stinking body.

This, folks, is the economy to which we are returning, at ever accelerating pace, as the global plutocratic oligarchy gobbles everything that generates value.

But in the meantime we have the bread-and-circuses thrill of progressive degradation to make up the loss of our future, all while expressing ourselves in baby talk, pretending to be other creatures, anything other than adult human beings confronting our too terrible to admit realities.

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* One does rather expect, that with such a stupid, impossible to remember title, Low Dark Sun  -- ooops! Low -- what it is it? look it up again --  Winter -- Winter! Sun will not go on for long.