The Percentages and Profits of the Game

Late to the party, alone on Christmas in an unfamiliar city, I spent the holiday weekend with television’s Baltimore crime series The Wire, a(n) (supposed) exemplar of the magnificent new form that we may as well call HBO Drama. I say “supposed” because the experience disappointed me, and I do not believe that I will watch past the second episode of the second season. Still, there were compelling moments (just not enough of them), some of which may have helped me clarify my thinking on one of the most portentous spectacles in our recent political history, as I will explicate now. Bear with me.

Episode eleven: Detective Kima Gregs, attempting to infiltrate Avon Barksdale’s murderous drug operation as the girlfriend of a club owner, is shot when an undercover buy goes bad. Counter-intuitively, Barksdale and his minions are not pleased to learn that they’ve shot a cop. In fact, they’re quite shook-up. Although cops are their enemies, shooting them is counter-productive, and threatens the delicate balance they need to thrive. Avon’s nephew, handsome D’Angelo, an up-and-comer with an unfortunate tendency to conscience, expresses the sentiment: “I mean, how you gonna shoot a police, yo? Ain’t no percentage in that, know what I’m saying?”

(The phrasing, context, and intent cannot help but call to my mind Huck Finn’s description of playing robbers with Tom Sawyer: “Tom Sawyer called the hogs ‘ingots,’ and he called the turnips and stuff ‘julery,’ and we would go to the cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and marked. But I couldn’t see no profit in it.” Huck’s guileless insight, the source of his appeal and rhetorical power, is a queer reflection of the gangbangers’, who are street and hard and tough but exhibit also a regular touching bewilderment, as when Wallace, a sixteen-year-old street dealer, retreats to his grandparents’ home on the Chesapeake, where he decides that he’s not cut out to be a “country nigger” because the crickets keep him up at night.)

In a previous episode, Barksdale’s crew assassinated a witness to a murder committed by, uncoincidentally, D’Angelo. The police response, also counter-intuitive, attempts to make the crime appear unrelated to the victim’s damning testimony. In so doing, they act on the same impulse that induced the gangsters’ regret at shooting Gregs: Both are trying to protect necessary illusions, the gangsters that there is honor among thieves, and the cops that they can protect those brave enough to speak out. There exists a civil society that licenses both gangsterism and cops, and both factions strive to protect it. Barksdale’s crew laments the attempted murder of a cop, and the powers that be seek to obscure the circumstances of a murder, because the value of neither a human life nor the truth is absolute. Both are twisted by the Game.

The trope of the Game is central both to The Wire’s rhetoric and its theory of how and what the world is. It exists as a kind of Kantian category, making the rules and defining the outcomes. Neither side can imagine the world or their conflict without the Game, and it is what allows Gregs and Detective McNulty to sanction a hit on Avon by his brutal rival, the great gay gangster Omar. (One of my problems with The Wire was not enough Omar.) In explaining the necessity of this, Omar famously tells them, “The Game is out there, and it’s either play or get played.” This explanation is accepted, by viewer and cop alike.

These devil’s bargains are all over our world, and while they are disgusting, repulsive to the point of gagging, they’re also necessary for the functioning of a society populated by humans. The results when they break down are ugly, as we’re seeing now in Mexico’s drug wars, Afghanistan’s powerlessness either to limit corruption or the Taliban, and Iraq’s yearlong struggle to form a democratic government, despite representative institutions. The worldwide resistance to the War on Terror, is in part a response to its inability as presently conducted to function as a Game; it makes up its rules as it goes along, violates inviolables like the Geneva Convention, and displays a shocking disregard for the traditional breakdown into good guys, bad guys, and bystanders. The Game qua civil society, as a concept and as a practice, is necessary for the healthful perception of events that licenses the ongoing conduct of our affairs.

Which brings me, if you can believe it, to the raison d’être for this post, which is a reflection on the recent negotiation between our President and Congressional Republican leaders on the matter of expiring tax cuts. My colleague has rather expertly explicated the stages of response, including anger, certainty, frustration, destabilization, and acceptance, all of which I share. The result of the negotiations looks like a paragon of How the Game Is Played. The Game of our politics, dating at least to the Connecticut Compromise and fetishizing of faction in Federalist No. 10, lauds compromise almost as an end in itself, and the narrative of this negotiation has settled it as a textbook compromise, each side giving up something it wants in order to move forward. Our Game, this narrative goes, requires compromise, which has in recent years been sorely lacking, and this outcome is therefore a good sign as we move tremulously forward into divided government.

I must, however, quibble. The enthymeme of compromise is that a good one settles the matter, and on this front the President and his Congressional counterparts did very poorly indeed. There were, going in, three extant positions: extend the current reduced tax rates in perpetuity, the Republican position; extend the current tax rates for a year or two to aid the recovery but let them rise in whole or in part once the recovery is on solid ground, the position of Obama’s former OMB Director Peter Orszag and other Democrats; and allow rates to rise for the wealthiest starting in 2011, the position of the President. Few media outlets did a good job making these distinctions clear, and fewer still pointed out what seems to me like the most important fact: Nothing was settled. None of these three positions carried the day, and we will be here again in late 2012.

(It’s also worth noting, because, again, few media outlets did, that what we are calling the Bush tax cuts sowed the seeds of this murk in 2001. The Republicans, controlling both branches of Congress as well as the Presidency, could have made those tax cuts permanent at the time, but the price in long-term budget projections was too high to pay. I don’t know whether they perceived it this way a decade ago, but the sunset provision also presented Republicans with an irresistible political opportunity: Either they are in power in 2010 and get to take credit twice for the same tax cut, or they aren’t, and get to take credit for blocking a Democratic tax increase. Such is also the nature of our Game.)

Whether or not this particular compromise is or will be good for the country, I will not pretend to know, although I suspect it was the very best that could be done, given the constraints of reality. But as a commentary on the state of our civil society, it is discouraging indeed. Both sides must be committed to the rules of the Game for it to proceed apace. Our DNA enshrines the slow slog of representative government, but if the best, most pragmatic compromise we’ve got these days entails a do-over in two years, next time in the shadow of what is likely to be a brutal Presidential election, that double helix is breaking down. Avon and D’Angelo know that they can’t go around killing cops willy-nilly; Gregs and McNulty know that Omar can be used only if he stays in the Game. The same long-view understanding of our politics is mostly absent from discourse both in- and outside the Beltway. In that foreshortened perspective, the tax deal may look pretty good. But from the perspective of the Game, it appears that the players are no longer playing. It’s a bad sign that the negotiations went so poorly; it’s even worse that we’ve mistaken them for good; worst of all is that it was probably the very best we could hope for.