It is the children, though, who make this such a powerful work. In one of many illuminating passages where first-hand reportage gives way to concise contextualizing, Simon and Burns write: “In the 1990s, the drug corner is modeled on nothing more complicated than a fast-food emporium, an environment in which dealing drugs requires about as much talent and finesse as serving burgers … the modern corner has no need for the applied knowledge of previous generations.”
The children, more than anyone, know this. They surrender one kind of education for another, the school for the street, the classroom for the corner. They know where their lives are going and what it takes to survive. They see the cost of not surviving all around them. They also, more chillingly, seem drawn to “the game,” to its deadly romance and the sense of entitlement, however brief or insecure that may be.
The Corner took more than a year of on-the-street research — what David Simon, who cut his journalistic teeth as a crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun, self-deprecatingly calls “stand-around-and-watch journalism.” It is beautifully written, by turns evocative and simmeringly angry. On one level, too, the book is an indictment of contemporary newspaper journalism, where this kind of sustained — and expensive — reportage has been replaced by desk work. In America, it seems, the system has failed several generations of inner-city families and the media have, to a great degree, let the government and the city legislators off the hook.
Early on in The Corner, Simon and Burns point out: “All across the inner city — from Lafayette Courts to Sandown to Cherry Hill — slinging drugs is the rite of passage.” In other words, neighborhoods once considered safe and middle class now have their very own corners. That, perhaps, is the real message of a book that, in the main, avoids messages, that does not preach or proselytize, but simmers with frustration and anger at the great farce that is America’s so-called war on crime.
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