Baltimore is one of the deadliest cities in the nation. In 2022, the police recorded 333 homicides for a rate of 58.4 murders per 100,000 people. The national rate for that year was 6.3.
This is nothing new. In 1993, 353 people were murdered in Baltimore, a record high. From 1979 to now, the number of homicides in a given year only dropped below 200 once. The rate since has remained above 25.
Baltimore journalist David Simon has covered crime in the city all of his working life. In 2002, after a 12-year stretch with The Baltimore Sun, Simon co-created The Wire, a TV drama inspired by his time on the crime beat. The show ran until 2008 and is regarded as one of the best shows in television history.
According to one former coworker, Simon believes journalism to be “God’s work.” Scheduling, interviewing, writing, reading, editing, haggling and many emails — this is Simon’s vision of holy labor. Evidently, Simon must think that God spends a lot of time at His computer and that He is often very busy talking to people that would ordinarily have nothing to do with Him.
There’s more to Simon’s idea of journalism. He describes it as “stand-around-and-watch writing,” a kind of divine loitering in which journalists get to know all the ins and outs of their subjects by simply hanging around them. When it comes to finding the facts, the devils are in the details, according to Simon, and only journalists are called upon to do battle with every last one of them.
For Simon, this meant hanging around policemen, politicians, stevedores, union leaders, drug dealers, drug addicts, murderers and the loved ones of murder victims. It also meant learning everything about how they walk, talk and think, from the calculus of a murderer to the emotion of a mother who has lost her child. Learning what’s real and what’s not in the multifarious Baltimorean lingos of manipulation, deceit, anger, false hope, fact — “what’s true in everything,” in Simon’s words — journalists in Baltimore are forced to count more than bodies in a morgue.
Across the Atlantic, murder is rarer on people’s tongues, and people talk more flippantly about “God’s work.” In Europe, the homicide rate is about a third of what it is in America, and almost twice as many Americans than Europeans believe in the biblical God. Fewer keyboards clack away in newsroom cubicles by divine commission. However, there is no shortage of grandiose ideals.
In the early 20th century, phenomenology spread through Europe like hot slang. Phenomenology is a philosophical method of study that aims to address subjectivity in all its facets, down to the most basic kernel of existence. It emphasizes the importance of lived experiences, and its final ambition directs itself toward objective knowledge, which can be achieved once all the distortions of subjective judgment are shed.
To quote German philosopher Martin Heidegger, phenomenology means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very in which it shows itself from itself.”
Phenomenology’s consequences can hardly be understated. Its domain is wide, calling for a radical reexamination of knowledge, existence, morality and everything in between. Ever since its advent, European academicians have been searching for a formula to reconcile the brutal acknowledgment of subjectivity with the pursuit of objective truth. So far, it’s been an ultimately fruitless chase for the Europeans — something like running after beautiful Atalanta, except Hippomenes has no golden apples.
But back across the Atlantic, far from the elliptical incantations of Teuton, among Baltimore’s hard, brick verbiage, the search for truth is not myth. Journalists like David Simon relentlessly search for real facts, wading through lies and corpses, and real life is something real, just like death, not a subjective construct.
Phenomenology in Europe translates to journalism in America. Today, there is a wealth of cheap philosophy and cheap media on both sides of the ocean. But if those interested in communicating truth want to right the ship, if not without, then at least within themselves, they must radically understand the size and scope of subjective experience. It’s impossible to step out of oneself and get it all right. But if not the globe, then at least the little corner one has, whether it be Germany, Baltimore or the Green Bean.
Contact Noah Kim at nkim4@oxy.edu
