officialDevil33

The marketplace of drugs. The low-rises. The pit. “Got your yellow tops!”
Thin drug addicts stumble their way to young black men, who take their wrinkled tens and twenties. A signal sent to the runners—boys waiting fifty feet away who run over, small vials in hand. The cops staked out atop a nearby building, hoping to get a photo of a kingpin on a random visit to the frontlines, are on break and not watching. Enter a man in a trenchcoat, carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Whistling “The Farmer in the Dell,” flanked by two accomplices, he approaches the stash house, an abandoned apartment where the large reserve of drugs is kept. The trio enters the house. He orders the five or six inside to get their hands up. He aims the shotgun at one. “Hey, yo, where it at?” he asks. The man refuses to say. He blasts him in the kneecap. The injured man’s screams convince one of the others to tell him where the stash is. The trenchcoat-wearing figure walks out, having robbed drugs dealers of their drugs. Behold Omar Little.
The marketplace of ideas. The three thousand year old history of moral
philosophy, the study of right and wrong. The warbling of disagreement, cackle of dialogue. “Good is what Gods says it is.” “Good is what the Law says it is.” “No, good is what realizes the ends of humanity.”

Omar the Nietzschean Overman? The Book of death by - Devil 33

Is Omar a value-creator? We've seen that Omar is undergoing a


transformation as he makes his way through the streets of Baltimore, taking on more and more powerful enemies. His code doesn't change, however, so we might think that he created a value-system prior to the beginning of the narrative. As we mull over this possibility let's consider a parable that appears in Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Called "On the Three Metamorphoses," it describes three transformations.


In the first metamorphosis the spirit morphs into a camel. It becomes a beast of burden, cheerfully taking upon itself the heaviest and most difficult of loads. It speeds into the desert, away from friends and everything it's always known. This is the breaking of the fetters, the freeing of the spirit. In the second metamorphosis the camel becomes a lion. It conquers its


own freedom and becomes master of the desert. The lion must slay the dragon of the "Thou Shalt," the Christian morality of good and evil. After this metamorphosis, the lion stands tall as the free spirit, the non-dogmatist, the noble. Omar roams the streets of Baltimore as the lion, once a camel, now a king. Wounded, yet still mighty, he's struck down not by another lion, or even another predator, but a member of the herd, too small and inconsequential for the lion even to see. But there follows a third metamorphosis in the parable. The lion becomes


a child, "innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.'" (Z, "On the Three Metamorphoses") The child begins anew because the "first movement" is the creation of new values. This child represents the overman—the new man. The underweight scales Nietzsche announces in the marketplace of ideas are now set right. Does Omar set the scales right? His code is distinguished from the


moralities of other people by his calling different things good and different things evil. The code still preserves the polar opposites of "good" and "evil," however. It's different only in what Omar places on each side of the scale—he accepts the scale nonetheless.Omar is a noble, no doubt, prepared to become brutal and violent when


necessary, but he doesn't need to continually re-establish his own superiority. He knows he is good. We find him in Puerto Rico, after having robbed the New Day Co-Op of their drugs (and having sold their drugs back to them!), handing out candy to the local children. This would have been a nice lasting image to have of him, had he not been forced to come back to the streets. Omar is a lion, but remains a lion, never undergoing the third


metamorphosis, never becoming a value-creator, thus never becoming the overman. At no point does he question the prevailing value system. In that respect he is not that different from the other characters of The Wire, or the rest of us for that matter. Far from being the overman, Omar is noble, but human, all too human. 


Chapter 7. Omar the Lion