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How do we allow God into our minds, bodies, relationships, and life? We stop squeezing the divine out through our preconceived notions of what is sacred and what is profane. When we assume the mind-set that everything is ultimately divine, though sometimes more disguised than others, then we can see that all of our thoughts, impulses, and desires arise from and can bring us back to awareness of the sacred.
Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution. And yet with more than 80 percent of Americans living in metropolitan areas, there are still demagogues who want to run down the idea of multiculturalism, of urbanity, being the only future we have. We either live or die based on how we live in cities, and our society is either going to be great or not based on how we perform as creatures of the city.
The rest of America, with some small exceptions, has been bulldozed and rebuilt and then bulldozed and rebuilt again. Our places have become interchangeable. Here in New Orleans, everything from the architecture to the way in which people eat, the way in which they talk, the way in which they do business, the way in which they dance, the manner in which everything is set to a parade beat, they're all from here. There's no place like it.
I feel like if you know any women who's an essayist or a writer or a public speaker or just a public person, and they have any presence at all in any kind of social media, or any place where men can voice at them, you have to be pretty amazed at the level of special provocation and sort of violent speech and misogyny that comes at them. Any woman that's really in the public sphere has experienced this. It's kind of shocking how universal it is.
That's what we were interested in: how power and money ran itself, much more so than 'drugs are bad, drugs are good.' That seems to me a simple moral equation and one you don't have to spend 60 hours of television examining. And I think the same thing is true with how we approached pornography or prostitution. Prostitution's been around since the Bible, and pornography's been around since about 15 minutes after the French guy invented the first camera.
The murder clearance rate now in my city Baltimore is almost non-existent. Nobody can solve a murder, nobody can do any actual police work, because they've learned how to do bad police work, chase drugs. Fighting vice, while being unable to respond to sin. Generations of cops have learned how not to police work by policing the drug war. Not only are they police brutal, they're ineffective. Baltimore is more violent than it has ever been in modern history.
In Baltimore they can't do police work to save their lives. Now because of Freddie Gray they're not even getting out of the car and policing corners - they're on a job slowdown, basically. Right now if the police stopped being brutal, if we got police shooting under control, and the use of excessive force, if we have a meaningful societal response to all that stuff, and the racism that underlies it, the question still remains: what are they policing, and why?
I'm making a lot of money. I should be paying a lot more taxes. I'm not paying taxes at a rate that is even close to what people were paying under Eisenhower. Do people think America wasn't ascendant and wasn't an upwardly mobile society under Eisenhower in the '50s? Nobody was looking at the country then and thinking to themselves, "We're taxing ourselves into oblivion." Yet there isn't a politician with balls enough to tell that truth because the whole system has been muddied by the rich. It's been purchased.
Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.
Since the Donald Trump election, which has involved this administration making direct attacks on press freedoms, you're actually seeing a certain amount of rallying and reinvigoration by the national press in terms of covering national issues and the presidency. The Washington Post and The New York Times, Mother Jones, ProPublica and a lot of other places, they've actually done some really strong work when confronted with this administration. But the resources that you used to have at state and local level aren't there anymore.
What appeals to me in The Deuce is some of the same things that made me interested in The Wire, which is there seems to be a theme here around markets and capitalism and labour. This is a moment, 1971, of something that was under the counter: then brown paper bags suddenly became legal, pornography. And it was really the birth of an industry which is now a multi-billion dollar American standard. And these people were the pioneers at a moment where there really were no rules, then suddenly there was a legal industry that was allowed to exist.
When we were kids coming up, if you stole your dad's Playboy magazine, that was about as much of an education as you were gonna get. You finish looking at the centrefold and you read 'The Playboy Adviser' that told you about what stereo to buy and something about sex which you didn't quite understand, and you were still just as confused. Now if you're ten the entire world of human sexuality, and a very misogynistic version of that, is available to you on a laptop after a couple of key strokes. I think it's changed the vernacular in the way men address women.
There were a lot of video store owners and managers out of work, once pornography became more about streaming and downloads. But the other thing is that there are a lot of people who make money by finding a place to stand and add almost nothing. It's particularly ironic if your job title is pimp. On some level, in a healthier world where sex work could be rationalized and the risk reduced, your whole job title would be extraneous anyway. It's not exactly a point of great grievance if you're a pimp that suddenly your prostitutes don't require the same level of reliance.