Craig Jerald observes of the fact that Namond, who seemed like the Wire kid least “deserving” of rescue turns out to be the only one who makes it through the minefield:

If America were a true meritocracy, one that rewarded talent—and developed talent for the common good—Duquan would attend an excellent school with a great math teacher, not a rookie who has no idea how to help him, let alone teach him. If it were a true meritocracy, budding and innovative capitalist Randy would be treated like the next Michael Dell, or at least someone who might actually own a store of his own someday. And in a true meritocracy (heck, even just in a halfway rational society) a kid with Michael’s practical smarts and immense leadership skills would be treated as a future business or civic leader—even a future mayor of Baltimore—and educated accordingly.

But for children in West Baltimore, making it has far more to do with luck than with merit. If The Wire is right, it has nothing to do with merit at all. How can we live with that?

It’s a good question. But consider this. Suppose the United States had a school system that wasn’t just non-dysfunctional, but actually almost magical in its properties. Kids who came into this school system with talent and ability lurking under the surface would be catapulted to success, notwithstanding their socioeconomic background or other problems. Randy, Dukie, and Michael all in their different ways become important successful people. And what happens to the others? What happens to people of merely average ability? Worse — what happens to people of less than average ability? What if you’re just dumb? Not anymore crooked or dishonest than anyone else, but less able. Do people like that just sink into the ghetto, into lives of poverty and despair? Is that really justice? Is the problem of the underclass in contemporary America really just that we’ve assigned the wrong people to live that way, and need a better system of sorting the able from the non-able?

That seems badly wrong to me. Yes, one problem with the condition of the underclass is that it prevents talented underclass children from being able to take full advantage of their talents. Another, deeper problem, however, is that in a prosperous society people simply deserve better living conditions than that. It’s unjust that living conditions of the sort portrayed in the show exist. Unjust that people live in neighborhoods that unsafe and that deprived of basic civic service. Unjust that people — even people without noteworthy talents and abilities — lack the opportunity to obtain a reasonable standard of living through legal means.

The good thing about a dictator like Augusto Pinochet is that even if he, sure, killed, maimed, and tortured a few people along the way, at least he implemented sound economic policies, right? Well, “multiple probes in recent years revealed financial corruption, including the discovery of millions of dollars in state funds held in numerous secret overseas accounts, among them several at the former Riggs Bank in Washington. As recently as October, Chilean investigators announced the discovery of 10 tons of gold, worth an estimated $160 million, in Pinochet’s name in a Hong Kong bank.”

Shocking! A dictator and his inner-circle using their power to enrich themselves? Maybe he killed all those people for personal gain rather than out of the goodness of his heart. See here and here on LGM for the contemporary right’s continuing praise of Pinochet. I think this is the context in which you have to understand American conservatism’s generally blasé attitude toward the Bush administration’s more modest ventures into the fields of arbitrary detention, corruption, and torture. Years of apologizing for the deployment of such tactics by America’s proxies abroad naturally desensitizes the political culture to the re-importation of these methods to the center.

UPDATE: Curious Jonah Goldberg post appears to me to apologize for Pinochet apologetics on the grounds that when Fidel Castro dies “certain quarters of the left” will engage in apologetics for him. So, okay, I’ll stipulate that Castro’s regime is a bad one and that, were it the case that pre-Castro Cuba had a democratically elected government it would have been very poor policy for the US government to help Castro mount a coup and aid him in entrenching his dictatorship.

Well. the good news about Iraq is that it’s not as if while we weren’t paying attention we allowed the Taliban to establish a mini-state in northern Pakistan or anything. Oops!

The sad factor of the matter is that if we haven’t already passed the tipping point in the Afghanistan/Pakistan area, we will have very soon. In practice, by the time Bush is out of office and our troops our out of Iraq, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be too late and we’re going to need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Taliban successor groups will have substantially re-entrenched themselves and there won’t be very much we can do about it except just kind of hope they don’t once again start playing host to terrorists plotting to attack America.