Word: wiring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Israelis fear could set the stage for the city's partition in an eventual peace settlement. Palestinian officials don't like the wall either, because it raises the possibility that Israel could one day shut the gates and forgo peace negotiations, leaving the Palestinian people isolated behind the barbed wire. If the fence makes today's periodic closings of the Green Line permanent, the Palestinian economy will suffer heavily in lost trade and work opportunities within Israel...
...prison spell in Florida, and eventually made his way to Afghanistan or Pakistan to make common cause with al-Qaeda. According to the government's account, he approached them with the idea of detonating a "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city, and they obliged by teaching him to wire a bomb. The impression, in the government's own account, is of a former street hoodlum desperate to join a new gang - and being kept at arm's length. An outsider taught to build a bomb (what's not to like, for al-Qaeda, about a U.S. passport holder asking...
That's part of the reason that HBO, which bills itself as the network that makes shows the others can't, picked up The Wire (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), a sprawling octopus of a story that follows a single drug investigation over 13 episodes. (Later this month Showtime adds Street Time, an earnest but somewhat tone-deaf series about parolees and parole officers.) Creator David Simon says The Wire is "not a cop show" but a series about how the drug trade and the war against it have become institutions that chew up and spit out the people who work...
...Wire sometimes oversells this point, as when D'Angelo teaches his crew members chess to show that they're pawns in a game (chess metaphors are always a reliable DIDACTICISM ahead sign). But it slowly develops into an engrossing look at the methodical nature of police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good...
Read this way, the network whodunit is like the mainstream post-9/11 superego, telling us that the system may make mistakes but it works. Evil is knowable, crime solvable, justice swift and attainable. The Wire and The Shield arrive like an unconscious (and just as American) response: It's O.K. to doubt, to question, to acknowledge the bad among the good. Decades of cop shows have schooled us on our Miranda rights, chief among them the right to remain silent. Cheers to these cable cops for exercising their right to make some noise...