DX: I’m one of those guys that holds weekly Wire discussions when an episode wraps up. Much has been said about Kenard being the one that kills Omar and some have gone back to season three when Omar’s stickup girl Tosha got killed while attempting to take a stash house and citing that it was Kenard who was the main child yelling “I’m Omar…” Was this purposefully down to set the stage?
EB: After the fact. A lot of the stuff is after the fact.

DX: But you guys did see this and tied it all together?
EB: Yeah. And Kenard (Thuliso Dingwall) was a great kid! When he read for his part, I wrote a little speech for him that never made it into the show. It was a little too much. But the kid read it, and nobody else every came close. There was no question that he was going to be Kenard.

DX: With that being said, some of the actors in the show had no prior acting experience but they turned out to do so well. I know part of it is that they do speak the language of the streets and many come from there. But were you shocked by anyone individual’s performance on camera?
EB: Shocked in a good way. You take the chances with these guys in a sense that you are asking them to carry this thing that’s in your head and you have hopes for. You really want them to come across. I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story. The first scene Michael had on The Wire was the love scene where he kisses his boyfriend. And that was not scripted – the kiss. What was kind of interesting to me was that the prop master walked up to Mike and he gave him a sawed off shotgun. Mike looked at the shotgun like it was some foreign object and said to the prop master “How do you open something like this?” I said to myself “Oh my God, what have we done here?” So the prop master explains how to do it and Mike does it. The director says “Okay, let’s go!” You would have thought that when he stepped onto set that his father had given him a shotgun when he was a baby. He was that comfortable. That’s incredible. Or when you are talking with Jamie Hector (Marlo Stansfield), who is one of the most spiritual guys you will ever meet. And you are talking about some very heavy aspect of culture and society. And you say “Okay Jamie, let’s go!” And you watch him step up and become Marlo. He becomes Marlo without any noticeable change of facial structure. There’s no detecting the tiny movement of the muscles in the face. Yet this guy you were talking to is suddenly this unbelievable sociopath. Snoop (Felicia Pearson) obviously blew us away. They all stepped up on the job.

DX: The Wire has done a great job of breaking down how and why America's various institutions have failed us my question is, How do we fix this shit?
EB: This might sound naïve. The only way you can fix this is to change the philosophical underpinnings of who we are as a people. What I mean by that is that in the 20th century, the human species took two gigantic steps. After World War II the idea that there was a white superiority was no longer valid. People of color were now equal. Now this didn’t happen everywhere but the idea was out there. Very shortly after that, in the 60s, the idea of women being equal became a basic. It’s often times denied. I think this century is going to be more profound. We have to decide if human beings, per se, are valued and have intrinsic value. Or are we going to hold to what we are holding to now that the productive human beings. And those who are not productive have no value and we can do without them when we want. It’s in that decision that we have to make up our mind .

When you have presidential candidate that’s talking about the idea of change. The change that I’m hoping that he’s talking about is in the way that we perceive things. It’s not fighting for health care or fighting for better schools or anything like that because none of that is going to happen until we make that decision. And if we make the right decision then the paradigms have been set up. The Republicans, the Democrats, the rich, the poor are going to shift. For democracies to work you need the unrest of the underclass. That has to happen. Since we demonize the underclass with drugs and criminality. Their voice has been muted. You don’t have that ferment that we had during the labor movement from like 1870 or the social ferment we had in the early '60s and '70s. We only have one side of the coin which is the wealthy with all their connections, pulling all of the strings, and there’s nothing to hold them in check because there’s no other side of the scales trying to balance them off. Not that it’s ever equal you know?

If you put a gun to a rich man’s head he’s going to give you some money. But if you don’t put a gun to him, he’s not going to come off of his money and that’s what Franklin Roosevelt figured out. He said “you know we have a chance of tumbling into a communist or socialist state we have to do something,” and that energy that came out of the new deal carried us well into the late '50s and early '60s. That was chipped away and changed. Then we went to this whole idea of globalization and the free market economy and we forgot where we came from. Ronald Reagan said it best. In 1981 he said we fought a war on poverty and we lost and we haven’t talked about poverty ever since, except for Hurricane Katrina. It’s been 20 years and we just ignored it. I think people will stand up because we have a history of people standing up. I think as things become more desperate and as George Bush who is our face of America as we look into that mirror and see his face and what that face has done. It’s created a certain ire that might be enough to shock us into doing the right thing for a change. That’s just me.