Chapter 1. Playing the Game for Themselves

The marketplace of drugs. The low-rises. The pit. "Got your yellow tops!"

Thin drug addicts stumble their way to young black men, who take their wrinkled tens and twenties. A signal sent to the runners—boys waiting fifty feet away who run over, small vials in hand. The cops staked out atop a nearby building, hoping to get a photo of a kingpin on a random visit to the frontlines, are on break and not watching. Enter a man in a trenchcoat, carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Whistling "The Farmer in the Dell," flanked by two accomplices, he approaches the stash house, an abandoned apartment where the large reserve of drugs is kept. The trio enters the house. He orders the five or six inside to get their hands up. He aims the shotgun at one. "Hey, yo, where it at?" he asks. The man refuses to say. He blasts him in the kneecap. The injured man's screams convince one of the others to tell him where the stash is. The trenchcoat-wearing figure walks out, having robbed drugs dealers of their drugs. Behold Omar Little.

The marketplace of ideas. The three thousand year old history of moral

philosophy, the study of right and wrong. The warbling of disagreement, cackle of dialogue. "Good is what Gods says it is." "Good is what the Law says it is." "No, good is what realizes the ends of humanity." "Good is what reason determines to be right." "Good is what maximizes happiness, evil what maximizes unhappiness." Enter a man in a topcoat, carrying a walking stick. He winces against the light, his cheeks blush. He pushes his way into the crowd, into the middle of the market, but gets shoved back, toward the edges of the mass. From here he sees clearly, and proceeds to speak clearly. "You all say that this is good and that evil, but not one of you has noticed that the scales are underweight. I ask you: what good is this value system of good and evil?" Behold Friedrich Nietzsche. Omar and Nietzsche are figures on the margin, playing the game for

themselves. Still, they are both potentially explosive. "I am dynamite," wrote Nietzsche, (Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny, 1) claiming to have great power, even while he received little recognition while he lived. Omar too has great power—and seeing just how much is a gift the creators of The Wire give to us, the viewers. These two figures are made for one another. Nietzsche is best known for his statement "God is dead," often

misunderstood as a simple expression of atheism. It's not just this, however … it's a diagnosis. Looking at the nineteenth century Europe in which he lived, Nietzsche judged that even as people professed to believe in God, their actions showed that they really didn't. God is dead because people have stopped believing in him, though without realizing that they have. Nietzsche observed the onset of a sickness in the civilized world. The moral system of good and evil—primarily Christian morality—and probably the entire value system of which it is a part, depend on belief in God. Take away this belief and you take away morality and values, leaving only nihilism. Walking the straight and narrow track won't help, if Jesus cannot save your soul, and the only devil to keep "way down in the hole" is your own imperfect nature. Casual readers of Nietzsche think he ends with nihilism, but he actually

begins here. Society is sick. How can it be made well again? How can we avoid nihilism, if we have fundamentally rejected the idea of God? Answering these questions is one of Nietzsche's overarching goals. One answer he offers is that we must learn to see what is contingent and changeable for what it is, and consequently break free of the prejudices and dogmatism society drums into us from birth. Once we do that, we will no longer be engaged in denying life, a perspective as common in our day as it was in Nietzsche's, but in affirming life. Recovering from life-denial and such deep pessimism about human nature is part of recovering from the illness of nihilism. The model he gives us of how to achieve these transformations is what Nietzsche calls the "overman" (sometimes translated as "superman"). Since the overman will be an answer to nihilism, and not a continuation of

it, this figure will espouse a moral code, and one quite distinct from the Christian morality. This is why when Omar—a man who kills, steals, and lies—says "A man gotta have a code," (Unto Others, Season 4) our interest is piqued. What is this code? Omar, depicted throughout as undergoing a kind of transformation of his own, stands apart from the rest of the world of The Wire, because he openly admits to the constraints of morality. What are these constraints? More importantly, what are they for him? And is his moral code what Nietzsche envisions morality to be for the future? In short, is Omar an example of the Nietzschean overman?