Tag: The Wire

Ann Coulter Is Not Sexy But She May Have a Point

Published on by D. G. Hart68 Comments

The right’s answer to Bill Maher, the lovely, the talented, Ann Coulter seems to have touched a nerve with her post about Dr. Kent Brantly, the physician who contracted Ebola in Liberia and is now (after being evacuated) receiving treatment in Atlanta.

Ann thinks the $2 million spent on the Dr.’s medically air-tight flight will wind up hurting Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charity that sent him, more than any good Brantly might have done in Africa. That seems fairly commonsensical. The missions committee of my communion needs to live within its budget. Its officers can’t simply flash an OPC Mastercard when a special opportunity arises or when the Spirit is supposed to have moved. For Presbyterians, everything must be decent and in order, which means within budget. I don’t know what Samaritan’s Purse’s reserves are like, but $2 million, if that is the correct figure, does sound like it could put a dent into good-doing in other parts of the world.

But Collin Garbarino believes the example of Jesus may teach a different lesson about Brantly’s situation:

Christianity has always been a little topsy-turvy. The mightiest king in the universe was born in a lowly stable. The second person of the Godhead “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant.” “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He had “no place to lay his head,” and he surrounded himself with a rag-tag group of fishermen and tax collectors. Jesus could stand as a righteous judge, but he allowed himself to die a sinner’s death. Through sacrifice God saved his people. Through death death is conquered. What’s more foolish than dying in order to live? Christ calls his people to do just that. Take up your cross and follow him.

The thing is, Jesus was born in the stable precisely because his parents didn’t have lots of cash to afford anything better. So doesn’t the humble birth of Jesus in some way back up Ann’s point? Doing good doesn’t allow you to escape creditors. And if Garbarino had gone to Satan’s temptation of Jesus, imagine the conundrum in which he would have found himself. For Jesus could have done a lot more good for planet earth (from one perspective) had yielded to the temptation to bow down to Satan and rule over all the earth’s kingdoms.

But Ann’s post went beyond finances to the motives of missionaries like Brantly — how this became a debate about missions when Samaritan’s Purse is a relief agency is an odd twist.

Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore — as the pope did — that you don’t have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.

Which explains why American Christians go on “mission trips” to disease-ridden cesspools. They’re tired of fighting the culture war in the U.S., tired of being called homophobes, racists, sexists and bigots. So they slink off to Third World countries, away from American culture to do good works, forgetting that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.

America is the most consequential nation on Earth, and in desperate need of God at the moment. If America falls, it will be a thousand years of darkness for the entire planet.

Ann has drunk a little too deeply at the font of American exceptionalism, but Al Mohler is not happy with Coulter’s raising questions about missionaries motives:

These two missionaries and all the others who have gone as authentic missionaries in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ have not been driven by a mere humanitarian impulse. They have not just gone to help those who are victims and patients. They have gone because they believe that every single human being on the planet is an individual made in God’s image. And they also believe that every single individual on the planet is a sinner in desperate need of salvation. They believe that every single human being on the planet, whether in West Africa or in the advanced Western nations including the US, are in great need of the gospel of Jesus Christ–and that what hangs in the balance is not just the outbreak of a contagion or the future of health but indeed the eternal realities of heaven and hell.

For Mohler, humanitarianism isn’t good enough. A missionary’s motives must be spiritual. They must be pure.

How do you disagree with that, except that most Christians if they are honest know that their motives are mixed (which is why it is so hard to follow the Obedience Boys). Even if I am performing a good work with the intention of being good, aren’t I really guilty of denying the sinfulness that clings to me as a child (though redeemed) of Adam? We are not perfectionists. And this is what makes a show like The Wire so valuable. I put my finger on this last night while watching Brotherhood, a series that comes as close to the feel and sensibility of The Wire without being a mere imitation. In both series we watch characters who are both ambitious (read selfish) and loving. Their ambition takes them to places they should not go — whether they play for the legal or illegal team. At the same time, they belong to families and neighborhoods and that membership sometimes motivates them to use their selfishness in selfless ways. The characters are a mix of vice and virtue.

Well, some might ask, are these shows about Christians? Aren’t Christians different or supposed to be? Well, Brotherhood features an Irish-American family for which the Roman Catholic Church is more than merely a backdrop. But even on Protestant grounds, I’m not sure that the Christian experience is decidedly different from the way these shows present the human experience. We are a mix of holy and wicked. What may make Christians different from the non-Christians of these series (and the real world) — to play by the confessional Presbyterian rule book — is that the latter don’t have holy motives but merely exhibit civic virtue. As the Confession explains — always steering us away from the temptation to invoke “human flourishing”:

Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands; and of good use both to themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet, their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God. (16.7)

But it is also important to remember that the Confession says our good works “are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment.” Perhaps this is granting more charity to Ann Coulter than she deserves, but her reservations about Dr. Brantly and other evangelical “missionaries” may be closer to the way that Christians should question themselves (and their good works) than the kind of blanket endorsement that Al apparently renders.

Why You Shouldn't Trust Website Rankings Now!

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

The missus and I are struggling to finish Mad Men. We are almost through with Season Six. A couple nights ago I asked if she agreed with my sense that Mad Men is superior to Breaking Bad only because of the atmospherics — 1960s urban American business culture with all the elegance that used to mark the professions. She did. Today, after a few more episodes, I asked if Breaking Bad was superior to Mad Men because it did not manipulate sex and flashbacks to make up for characters without any interest. She agreed again.

I’m on a roll.

But I am almost to the breaking point with Mad Men after Don Draper’s personification of Marlin Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Draper seems even less of a real character than Walter White. His appeal apparently is his sexual performance but since the writers don’t seem to be interested in dialogue (and they can’t show even simulated sex on AMC), we have to assume that Draper has no need for Viagra, penicillin, or words that actually woo his conquests (even though he’s supposed to be quite the wordsmith with his advertising firm’s clients). The only depth we receive for Don or his times are flashbacks to his boyhood — as if growing up for part of his youth in a bordello explains his insatiable desire (as if my fundamentalist parents could not have come up with that story line) — and scenes from broadcast news telecasts about the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. My peers in radio-tv-film at Temple University could have written a better script.

Meanwhile, the viewing public is clueless:

Rottentomatoes
The Wire 100%
Breaking Bad 99%
Mad Men 97%
Foyle’s War 100%

IMBD
The Wire 9.4
Breaking Bad 9.6
Mad Men 8.7
Foyle’s War 8.4

Amazon
The Wire 4.5
Breaking Bad 5
Mad Men 4.5
Foyle’s War 5

Old Life
The Wire A
Breaking Bad C-
Mad Men F
Foyle’s War A-

You Don't Need to be David Simon to Know that Arcade Fire Does Not Play Jazz

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

But watching Treme will help.

The missus and I have finished season three of Simon’s latest HBO series and it holds up even if it is not as good (to all about me) as The Wire. Both series are about medium-large historic American cities under siege — drugs in The Wire’s Baltimore and hurricane Katrina in Treme’s New Orleans. The characters in both are grizzled survivors, not victims, who don’t get any help from large bureaucratic organizations — police, city government, federal government — to assist their struggle to survive. In fact, the organizations that are supposed to play umpire so that bad people don’t profit from others’ suffering are either inept or have palms out positioned to be greased by profiteers.

Unlike The Wire, Treme is missing the cops/murder mystery dimension. Originally I was not interested in The Wire because I figured it would be another gussied up cop show — Hill Street Blues for the new millennium. But I was wrong. The legal dimension of the show always supplied a story line, which in turn helped to make sense of the Dickensian set of characters that come and go. It led me to conclude that “the law makes it better,” meaning, without the clear sense of injustice in pursuit of resolution through justice, arguably the narrative that holds this here planet earth in some place of cosmic meaning, a show like Treme wanders. In season three, legal aspects of Treme receive more prominence and drama heightens as a result. But this viewer has a hard time understanding what holds all the characters’ lives together other than the city.

Of course, the one prominent feature of Treme that might yield coherence — more in the form of a documentary — is music. If I were a fan of jazz I might enjoy the series more, but usually during every episode I say to my wife, much to her annoyance, “too much music.” A constant battle in the show is that between authentic New Orleans music, which includes jazz (in various forms) and zydeco for starters, and the tourists who know nothing about music and come to town to hear celebrity acts that are distant from the city’s musical heritage. Again, I don’t know enough music to weigh in on any of this, but the show did allow me to discern that Bruce Springsteen and Christina Aguilera, who recently appeared at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, were likely there because of folks trying to profit from a national perception of the city rather than because they represent anything indigenous to New Orleans or Louisiana.

Christina Aguilera! Really?

After The Wire They Broke the Mold . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart189 Comments

The missus and I finally polished off Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher turned meth cooker and dealer, the principal character of Breaking Bad. As I have indicated several times, Breaking Bad always left me (and the wife) feeling manipulated. Walt never seemed like a real character with genuine demons. He came across, instead, as a vehicle for writers to fashion for the purpose of extending a story line. Schuyler, his wife, also never seemed credible in her transformation from vapid housewife to gangster spouse. But then, the operation that Walt worked with either to cook, distribute, or make money never seemed credible, as if he could stand up to existing drug cartels and assorted kingpins and live to tell about it. The only likable characters were Saul, the lawyer, who is more cartoonish than real, Mike, the hitman who clearly would have cleaned Walt’s clock any number of times had it not been for the writer’s hi-jinks, and Hank, who seemed competent until he learned that Walt was the object of his long search and turned into a brooding bowl of jello for several episodes.

I am glad the series is over. We stayed with it only to see what the writers would try next.

But to compare this to the Sopranos (which I haven’t seen much) or The Wire defies belief. First, the characters in both of those shows seem plausible and are likable, even with their faults and wickedness. Second, the writers seemed to know something about organized crime and that you don’t simply decide one day to open up a drug operation and keep your life without gangstering up with a lot of protection. Third, in The Wire, as I’ve said, you like almost every character even if they are against each other — from Jimmy to Stringer Bell, from Prop Joe to Avon Barksdale, from Bubbles to Omar. And as the wife said, never has a show had so many African-American characters that you were sad to see go when the series ended (or when they died).

Of late, some commentators have wondered about the problem of binge viewing — the practice of watching numerous episodes over the course of one evening rather than seeing them in real time when they originally air. This may be a problem in the television series genre but I have no idea how anyone will remedy it. What concerns me is the knowledge that viewers have about the number of episodes left in a given season or show. In Homeland’s second season, for instance, several significant plot twists occur in the first two episodes in a way that leaves you wondering how the writers will get through all twelve episodes. The same happened at the beginning of the second part of Breaking Bad’s last season — though the habit of showing the result of a plot line, say Walt arranging his bacon into a 52 and then backing up to show how Walt got there felt contrived (as did too much of the show — have I already said that?). At least in a movie, even if you know how long it is supposed to be, you have a sense that before you is a complete unit that will resolve itself and let you walk away. With a television series, you have too much time to wonder what the writers are scheming and whether they are doing so simply to secure a contract for another season.

Unless, of course, you’re watching The Wire, in which case, you’re only left hoping that David Simon might consider another visit to Baltimore to update the doings of Gus, Bunk, Bubbles, and Marlowe.

Can Arminians Enjoy "The Wire"?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Thanks to the video going round on the world-wide interweb, I’ve been thinking about aspects of Calvinism that had been safely buried in old files from seminary. This is the relationship between Arminianism and Calvinism and the old objections to Reformed Protestant teachings on election, the atonement, and divine wrath. The video above by Jerry Walls is quite clear in presenting an argument that Calvinists don’t believe God is love. The implication is that Arminianism is superior (and true) because it teaches that God is love. Arminians really take John 3:16 seriously.

Here’s an instance of the complaint against Calvinism from Roger Olson:

Arminian: “You Calvinists don’t really believe in God’s love.”

Calvinist: “Oh, but we do. You’re so wrong! The Bible is clear about God being love.”

Arminian: “But you don’t believe God loves all people, so how can you believe, as the Bible says, that God is love?”

Calvinist: “God loves all people in some ways but only some people in all ways.”

Arminian: “Uh, you seemed to be in a trance as you said that. Are you sure you didn’t just hear that somewhere and are repeating it like a mantra—without really thinking about what you’re saying?”

Calvinist: “No, that’s what I really believe!”

Arminian: “How does God love those he predestined, foreordained, to hell?”

Calvinist: “He gives them many temporal blessings.”

Arminian: “You mean he gives them a little bit of heaven to go to hell in.”

I can certainly appreciate Olson’s point. One of the harder aspects of Calvinism to fathom is the notion of election. It is not a consoling doctrine if you are looking for charity and equality as most humans conceive of these ideals.

At the same time, I can’t imagine Arminians with their view of divine love ever convincing the likes of Woody Allen that God is love. Granted, Calvinism wouldn’t be persuasive either. But it is not as if secular folks like Allen don’t notice other features of existence that give pause to believing in a loving God. Human suffering is evidence that in this world not every human being experiences a slice of heaven before receiving their ultimate reward. Would Arminians really have us believe that a loving God makes sense of disparities on both sides of death?

For instance, if God is love, why do the penguins have to march and swim as far as they do to reproduce?

Or, if God is love, why does he allow people like Jimmy, Bunk, Omar, and Stringer Bell to live in as dysfunctional a place as 1990s Baltimore?

Or, if God is love, how do Arminians make sense of what Joshua and the Israelites did to the inhabitants of Jericho and Ai?

Everywhere you look, we don’t see a “wonderful day in the neighborhood.” So maybe the current crop of Arminian promoters need to switch from PBS to HBO where they could ponder circumstances that suggest a dark side of God, a deity who so loves the world that he sent his beloved son to bleed and die on a cross.

(All about my) New Man Crush

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

After a visit to Baltimore I had a hankering to revisit the characters from The Wire, I do miss them so. And my regard for the show may have turned me into an snob when it comes to the current crop of popular cable tv series — Mad Men and Breaking Bad. A colleague believes I have set the bar too high when watching Breaking Bad, for instance. By the same logic, I should like Miller High Life compared to Smutty Nose IPA (but when Miller Lite drafts are $1 is on tap, why not order it like it’s sparkling water. Wait, it is.)

A recent piece on Breaking Bad just doesn’t convince me, anyway:

Early on, Walt refuses a sincere offer from a former colleague to help him pay for his treatment. Here we catch a glimpse of a man whose low station in life belies an enormous amount of pride. Soon, in an inversion of the Book of Job, Walt leverages his personal suffering to justify entering “the business.” As the factors that ostensibly led him to “break bad” disappear, each justification gives way to the next until he is completely convinced of the righteousness of his cause simply because it is his. How else could a man utter lines such as, “I’m not in the drug business, I’m in the empire business,” with a straight face?

All this thematic potency wouldn’t matter much if the writing weren’t so taut, the performances so spellbinding, the suspense so addictive. But without fail they are. Which is why we have every reason to trust that Gilligan and company will bring their parable of pride to a satisfying conclusion.

I know some don’t think that David Simon developed characters on The Wire sufficiently. But Walt is not developed — full stop. He seems to be a weather-vane the writers can turn, depending on the direction the plot needs to go. With Jimmy and Bunk and Omar you had a decent sense of who they were and the nature of their demons. With Walt, he’s an adoring father one minute, a milk toast another, and Stringer Bell the next. His wife is almost as bad, from dipsy mom, to trampy drug boss spouse, to pouting and intimidated soccer mom. Jesse is a far more believable character, as is Mike, the muscle. And even if the attorney, Saul Goodman, is a tad clownish, I’d much rather see a series about his life than Walt’s.

A show that helps to reveal the Breaking Bad’s limits is Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen (who now replaces Gabriel Byrne in my list of male crushes). We are only about six episodes into the series, but what has made it so charming is what also sold us on The Wire — you have appealing characters depicted on a richly textured canvas. In the case of The Wire it was Baltimore and the woes of a somewhat major American city. In Foyle’s War the context is England during World War II. In this it resembles Downton Abbey (though Foyle’s War came first), but Foyle’s War is not soap operaish. And Michael Kitchen’s facial gestures accomplish what Vince Gillian’s writers only wish they could achieve.

I don’t regret watching Breaking Bad though I can’t believe it took until the end of season three with the introduction of Saul Goodman for the writers to figure out that the characters’ conflicting motivations make for real drama. Have they never seen a Coen Brothers movie!?! But I do seriously regret the comparisons of Breaking Bad to The Wire. Anyone who spent any time in Avon Barksdale’s Baltimore knew that Walt was going to need a lot more human capital and connections than little old Jesse. Breaking Bad never broke plausible.

Breaking Bad Is Peaking Early

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

The cats have been sleeping through a lot lately, especially the little hellion (Cordelia) who now that the wood burning stove is running cooks until she almost turns soggy. We have watched, for instance, Margin Call (a well done movie about Wall Street on the eve of the 2008 meltdown), Newlyweds (pretty good movie about modern romance even if borrowing too much from Woody Allen as Edward Burns is wont), Whistle Blower (a decent English movie about intelligence and the Cold War that pines for an England innocent of espionage and mightier than the U.S.), and Republic of Love (a lame movie about modern romance unless you like seeing Bruce Greenwood’s naked chest — I am not that metrosexual). But the subject of discussion between the missus and me of late is the television series, Breaking Bad. Having spared Mrs. Hart of the ghoulish opening episodes and the indelicate elimination of bodies (I believe in eschatological discontinuity but I hope the resurrection won’t be so radical), we are now into the second season and the era of Walt’s shaved head.

The early returns are that the series has transgressed the line of suspension of disbelief. The reason for the trespass may be the writer’s sense of needing to keep viewers’ attention with a fairly minimal set of characters. Compared to The Wire which had all of the resources of Baltimore at the creator’s disposal, this is supposed to be the story of one man’s struggle to survive.

Whatever the reason, the episodes with Tucco, while entertaining and dramatic, are simply implausible and make the prospects for another three seasons after this one even more unbelievable. How is Walt going to keep this a small operation? Or will he need to become an Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in order to pay his medical bills? But to come as close to being killed (by Tucco) and discovered (by his DEA brother-in-law, Hank) and live to see a return to cooking seems just too much. These tensions would have been more appropriate at the end of Walt’s tenure as meth dealer, not as the beginning of a new stage in his evolution.

The most unbelievable part was Tucco’s father failure to ring the bell on Jesse while being interrogated by Hank. If this had been a stand alone instance of remarkable providence, maybe it would have been plausible. But it was part of too many other very strange circumstances that had to break not bad but right for Walt and Jesse to live to see another batch. And the problem with cutting it so close to being discovered — can we really believe that Hank doesn’t know what’s going on — is that the writers don’t have the backup that David Simon did in The Wire. If Walt goes to jail, the series ends. When Avon went to jail, The Wire became even more interesting.

This doesn’t mean that Breaking Bad is bad. It only means that so far the Harts are not hooked. After season one, episode five of The Wire, we were all in.

Mark Emmert, the Avon Barksdale of College Athletics

Published on by D. G. Hart71 Comments

Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and Jews worried about the spread of moral relativism in the United States should be encouraged by the sanctions against Penn State imposed this morning by the NCAA (which include vacating all of Joe Paterno’s victories between 1998 and 2011). Granted, Americans show no consensus on gay marriage or abortion, but with slavery and racism now child molestation also is settled. Actually, instead of being relativistic, Americans are morally rigid about most matters. Even pro-choice advocates are emphatic about the moral good of a woman’s right to choose, as well as the immorality of the pro-life position. The problem in the United States is not a lack of morality. It is that most every issue comes in either black or white. This means that a lack of moral consensus among Americans is to put it mildly, contested.

What is less clear is whether Americans are capable of distinguishing among the depravity of various vices the way, say, the Shorter Catechism talks about some transgressions of the law being more heinous in the sight of God than others. The case of Joe Paterno is proof. The overwhelming condemnation of the recently deceased coach would tempt a visitor from Mars to think that Paterno himself had molested the boys who came through Penn State’s football facility. But covering up a felony is not the same level of offense as committing a felony. Just ask Chuck Colson and Richard Nixon.

The laws of Indiana, the site of NCAA headquarters, may be instructive here (even though they played no role in Mark Emmert’s decision to punish Penn State and the reputation of Joe Paterno. Child molestation is a Class A felony in Indiana and is punishable by a sentence of a minimum of six years in prison (according to a 2000 summary). Perjury, on the other hand, is a Class D felony in Indiana and brings with it up to ten months in prison and a possible fine of $10,000. It is fairly clear that Paterno did not commit child molestation. The worst that he did was to lie before the Grand Jury, a difference between a Class A and Class D felony (it would seem to this legally challenged observer). If his offense was simply not reporting Sandusky, Indiana law classifies this as a Class B misdemeanor, which could bring a fine of $1,000 and a prison sentence of up to 180 days.

But this is all based on Indiana law, the jurisdiction where Mark Emmert and his colleagues work. According to one story from last fall, Pennsylvania has no law requiring persons to report child abuse.

What this suggests is that the NCAA is a lot harder on crime than the states themselves which have law enforcement officers with real guns and facilities with real bars and really sharp barbed wire. That may be a good thing, though I can’t imagine Emmert taking away JoePa’s wins if the coach were still alive. (The courage of the NCAA only goes so far.) But it does confirm my impression, after several viewings of The Wire, that justice mediated the state is more forgiving than justice executed outside the law. For anyone who challenged Avon or Marlo, eliminating the challenger’s existence was the only way to maintain order. But inside the agencies of the police, public school teachers, city administration, or journalism, if you violated procedures or lied to bosses, you got a reassignment, a demotion, or at worst lost your job. But unlike Barksdale’s lieutenants who cheated their boss, if you lied to the city editor of the Sunpapers about your source, you lived to see another day.

After today’s actions, the NCAA appears to exhibit a form of justice much closer to drug dealers than to civil authorities. Unfortunately for Paterno, he is not alive to see a day on his calendar that includes a visit to Emmert’s office in Indianapolis.

What Bushy Top and Stringer Bell Might Teach Us About Mr. Laden

Published on by D. G. Hart240 Comments

After saying my morning prayers (see, I am devout), tending to the livestock, and fixing the coffee, I tuned into my favorite radio show (my wife’s most hated) to learn not only that Phillies had lost but that Osama Bin Laden had lost his life. To hear sports-talk radio hosts commenting on life, death, and terrorism was obviously strange, though they would have also been my path to news of 9-11 if streaming audio were available back in the dark days of Windows XP.

But even stranger and more inappropriate was to listen to sports fans chime in with glee about Mr. Laden’s death. To treat this man’s execution and burial like another Joe Blanton loss is clearly not fitting. What the event seems to call for is a ceremony – akin to the one in which President participated at the National Cathedral after 9/11. My Old Life sensibility tempts me to conclude that our culture cannot ceremonialize the death of a national enemy because we are no longer a ceremonial culture – too much Praise & Worship worship. But this would be a cheap shot in the worship wars. What is actually the case is that human beings have a long history of celebrating an enemy’s death in a manner more appropriate to a sporting even. Just think of what the Italians did to Mussolini. The communist Partisans captured him, executed him, and then hung him by his feet in a public square in Milano where the locals proceeded to jeer and throw rocks. Don’t underestimate human vindictiveness.

But don’t underestimate either the dark side of this bright moment in this chapter in the chronicles of justice. Since I have been re-watching Season Three of The Wire – the season where the fate of the drug lords, Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale is settled – I have thought about the events of last night through the lens of human frailty so brilliantly depicted in that award-winning HBO series.

First, I heard on NPR that one of the oddities about Mr. Laden’s compound was that such a massive and expensive place would not have either internet or phone service. Boy, does that have The Wire written all over it. To evade the special unit given the task of catching Avon, which had used a fairly sophisticated system of wire taps, even to be able to track disposable phones, the head of the entire drug enterprise went without a phone altogether. To contact him, people had to talk to his minions, or executive minions. Mr. Laden didn’t need to be a fan of The Wire to see the logic of going without electronic communication, but sometimes life does imitate art.

Second, if Mr. Laden were an American citizen selling drugs or directing terror, chances are the authorities would not have had the freedom to kill him on sight. Their first action would have been to capture him, read him his rights, and then start the wheels of U.S. jurisprudence rolling – which might involve some roughing up behind closed doors in police office buildings. But if Mr. Laden were like Avon, he would likely still be alive (if he did not resist arrest).

Third, what kind of strategy did the American military use in killing Mr. Laden? In The Wire the mayor and police chief are often more interested in symbolic victories – declines in statistics, or drugs piled on tables for journalists to see and photograph – than the real source of the problem. In other words, they are more interested in winning re-election than in strategic allocation of resources. In which case, was Mr. Laden a target of military and intelligence officials? Or was he a trophy for administrators in the Pentagon to maintain budgets and for the White House to look tough on terror?

Another layer in managing the publicity of Mr. Laden’s death is the relationship among the United States, its Western and middle-Eastern allies, and Pakistan. Military and civilian authorities are choosing their words carefully to prevent embarrassment for the Pakistanis. What The Wire’s police chief Burrell says to his Colonels is different from what he says to the mayor behind closed doors which is different from what Burrell says to the press. Another instance of personal, professional, and civic calculations is Tommy Carcetti’s decision to run for mayor of Baltimore. As one of the few white councilmen in the city, the only shot he has to defeat the black incumbent is if another black councilman runs in the Democratic primary and splits the African-American vote, thereby letting Tommy emerge as the great white hope – who even during the mayoral campaign is calculating how to manage city politics in a way that will allow him to run for state (governor) and or federal (senator) office. Celebrators should not let Mr. Laden’s death prevent them from seeing the layers of interests – what the Coen brothers do when exploring the mixed motives of their characters – that inform presidents, generals, chiefs of staff, kings, ministers of parliament and journalists in their massaging of, taking credit for, or distancing from this event.

Last, celebrators should remember the experience of Bushy Top, Jimmy McNulty, once he finally hit his target. Jimmy had to do some real soul searching about whether he was going after Avon and Stringer for the sake of the city, his commander, or personal fulfillment – colleagues did tell him he needed to get a life. To the degree that his own identity was bound up with convicting one of B&B Enterprises’ co-owners, Jimmy also saw how incomplete he was. The defeat of Avon and Stringer turned out to be a thin reed on which to hang Jimmy’s search for meaning. The death of Mr. Laden will generate great ebullience. Americans should beware of the rapid and scary descent on the other side of this roller coaster ride.

What in anyway does any of this have to do with Reformed faith and practice? In keeping with the neo-Puritan insistence on application, the theological payoff of a Wired reading of Mr. Laden’s death is this: although the Bible teaches human depravity God’s word doesn’t really explore it in its amazing and complicated depth – as in the wickedness that clings to the best of human actions – the way that productions like The Wire do, or the Coen Brothers’ movies, or even the occasional French film like Jean de Florette. To be alert to the variety and tenacity of human sinfulness, you need to look at the poignant portrayals of human existence that come from some of the best artistic expressions (though the Old Testament has its moments).

What the Bible does teach is the remedy for sin. Its salvation is not a government that enforces God’s law or even that reinforces the rule of law, as good as those forms of rule may be. The only remedy is a savior whose work of redemption is so amazing that he could even, pending faith and repentance, save Mr. Laden from his obvious sin.