I will probably regret wading further into this, but: one of the reasons I've always admired David Simon despite his personality, which I think he would admit is unpleasant, is that I consider him (as I told someone today) something of a poet laureate of diseased systems. 1/
It is the brutal truth behind much of his work that systems, not individual bad actors, are broken -- but that systems are made up of bad actors who are complicit. That's why I was so surprised to see him treat what we know as MeToo as essentially a list of men. 2/
A list of men who have done one very specific bad thing: try to "get with" someone using their workplace power. Curiously, almost all the accusations I can think of are something other than that -- sometimes much worse, often just different. 3/
You can tell if you read his tweets from today that it offends him to see someone like Franco, who is not accused of the specific thing he believes this movement is about, in the same conversation as the list of men he considers legitimate targets. 4/
What is missing is an understanding of this movement, as it were, as an effort to expose a broken *system*. And as with many broken systems, it is made up of the most gruesome wrongdoers, the simply inert, and a thousand gradations in between. 5/
When Simon has examined systems, he has excelled at explaining the connections between a brutal act of violence and a series of indignities; the way levers pull in large and small ways to protect power. This is his *gift*. 6/
It is unfair to suggest that no one until now has considered the differences between every individual allegation and every other one; between the levels of evidence that lie between a whisper and a series of calls to the police. Those things have been *deeply* considered. 7/
What is frustrating isn't being asked to consider that not all these behaviors are the same, but being denied the basic understanding that they operate as parts of a single system. And that system is complicated, and not entirely populated by villains. 8/
Reducing this public conversation to a list of untouchable men is what makes it seem normal to spend our time debating every gradation of badness, rather than saying: We all need to pull together to improve the functioning of this system. 9/
Because, again, it is systems that crush opportunity and break spirits and lead to epidemics of violence, and even the parts of a system that don't represent its most grievous wrongs belong in a conversation about fixing it. /fin
For reference. google.com/amp/s/www.roll…
