He's got to go...

We finished watching the first season of The Wire this evening. It is an excellently written and gripping drama. It is also depressing in its basic message. An insistent detective is driven by his desire to assauge guilt rather than to combat evil. His unorthodox insistence forces the system into following his lead. But police department politics and incompetence lead to clumsy raids and blown opportunities and unnecessary murders and an attempt to boot everything up to the FBI level results in political hits but the dealers’ business continues. The apparent message is that if, as an individual, you want to change a system, you have to have the power to change the system. Otherwise, all you will do is change the individuals within the system…