This is mainly referring to the fact that everything moves so fast now-a-days that we have more of a tendency to get careless or take short cuts.

Fun Fact: the prevalence of natural disasters really is on the rise. This is not what Gary is talking about here though.

Gary said of this song:

The banjo really stands out on this track. It tells a lot about life in 2002, how busy you can get being caught up in the rat race. It reminds me of my childhood and it’s a really cool tune–one of our favorites

This is a reference to the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina, the setting of the Andy Griffith Show

http://youtu.be/_HSZ8xJoCIg

Obviously there was a heightened sense of urgency in 1969, and rightly so.

• The Vietnam protests were met with aggression on the part of our government, and were otherwise being ignored.
• The Civil Rights movement had succeeded in making only superficial changes in many cases.
• Many great leaders of the black communities had been assassinated.

And so on…

Clearly these young kids had been radicalized by our government’s continued actions, and while understandable, this view that protests and marches were futile was extremely myopic. It didn’t take into account that the emergence of wide-spread social dissidence was a huge victory in itself. Aside from (bloody) labor protests during the early 1900’s, this was literally unheard of in America.

This satirical spelling was very common among radical Leftists, as we see it in other publications from the New Left around the same time. It’s not exactly clear why this spelling is used. It may have something to do with the 1927 novel Amerika by Franz Kafka, in which the Statue of Liberty is holding a sword, signifying the “might is right” philosophy of the U.S.

However, this was more than likely influenced by the Black Liberation movement with which the radical Left often worked closely. There are supposedly 4 reasons for this Afrocentric spelling, arguably the most important being:

Europeans, particularly the Portuguese and British, polutted Afrikan languages by substituting ‘C’ whenever they saw ‘K’ or heard the ‘K’ sound as in Kongo and Congo, Akkra and Accra, Konakri and Conakry, by substituting Q whenever they saw KW. No European language outside of Dutch and German has the hard ‘C’ sound. Thus, we see the Dutch in Azania calling and spelling themselves Afrikaaners.

In other words, the spelling was, in itself, a form of political protest to Amerikan imperialism.

The War on Drugs was literally invented by Richard Nixon during his 1968 campaign, despite there being no real drug problem to speak of.

While the fervor subsided a bit under President Carter, once Reagan took office, he gave a speech to rally support for a surge in the drug war, saying:

I was not present at the Battle of Verdun in WWI, but from that battle I learned of…an old French soldier who said…‘There are no impossible situations. There are only people who think they are impossible.’

This was a very fitting allusion, since the Battle of Verdun is famous for being the longest and most brutal battle of WWI, and accomplishing virtually nothing for either side.

In 2011, the War on Drugs reached its 40th anniversary. Over the past decade, we have been spending roughly $30 billion per year. Technically, the War on Drugs has been going on since the early 1900’s though. If you look at the history of the War on Drugs, virtually every major law ever passed has been racist to the core, and based on nothing more than spook propaganda:

• Outlaw of heroin and opiates was aimed at Chinese immigrants.
• Outlaw of cocaine was reportedly due to coked-out black men raping white women down south.
• Outlaw of marijuana was partly due to its popularity among Mexican immigrants.
• Laws against crack cocaine were 100 times as severe as laws against powder cocaine – which had become a “high class” drug – once the crack epidemic hit in the late 70s.

Even if we ignore the brutal prejudice of drug laws, over the 40 years since Nixon first declared a “war on drugs”, the fight has been an utter failure in every way possible; except for those for-profit prisons and the corporations who make use of prison slave labor.

This line really exposes the bullshit of Judge Phelan, and all the other cogs of the bureaucratic machine. Phelan pretends to hold the traditional rules of the court sacred, yet he isn’t so strict with other aspects of the law enforcement.

Often times, people in power will follow the rules whenever it suits them, and ignore them when it doesn’t.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected–those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!–and listens to their testimony.

Another perfect example of your average BPD Detective…

In the end, Barlow could care less about D'Angelo walking free. These guys exist in a different world than detectives, thus, it isn’t their family or friends that are in danger, but those who live in the West Baltimore Projects.

When he says “I’ll be chalking you off one night”, he is referring to those chalk outlines of murder victims at crime scenes. He suspects – rightly so – that one day Stringer himself will fall victim to violence. The comment is meant to inform us of the futility in the War on Drugs…eventually these big criminals will be killed anyway, only to be replaced by another.

Wee-Bey is a trusted enforcer for the Barksdale operation. We’ll learn a lot more about him later as the show progresses.

The reason for him being in the court that day should be obvious: to scare the shit out of the witnesses. Even though this intimidation tactic only worked on one of the witnesses, everything went as planned.