Dan Kois

The Netflix model is working. The company’s first-quarter revenues are up 80 percent in the last year, and Netflix boasts nearly 2 million subscribers. In the vocabularies of many culture snobs, “to Netflick” has become synonymous with “to rent,” as in, “Yeah, I Netflicked the ‘Freaks and Geeks’ box set this week.” I know people who have gone buck-wild on their Netflix queues, stockpiling the maximum of 500 DVD titles for future viewing and dreamily pasting their queues to Internet message boards.

“If you stacked every DVD we ship in a single pile,” Netflix’s starry-eyed P.R. material claims, “the stack would grow by 1,600 feet each day and be taller than Mt. Everest within a month.” The company believes itself to be a Force For Good: “If Netflix members, instead of receiving movies by mail, drove two miles each way to a rental store, they would consume 250,000 gallons of gasoline per day and release 750,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.” Apparently, nine out of 10 Netflix members are satisfied enough to recommend the service to friends.

I guess I’m that one other guy. I hate Netflix.

We go back a long way, Netflix and I. When I rejoined Netflix for the third time, I brought with me a history of failed Netflix relationships. At the time of our first dalliance, in 2000, Netflix was a tender young thing — less than a year old, and part of the brave new world of online convenience. Just as my new best friend Kozmo.com could arrange for a smiling dreadlocked messenger to deliver a pint of Chubby Hubby in minutes, so could Netflix keep my new DVD player well-stocked. Never again would I pay late fees! Never again would I, weeping, search the apartment for something worth watching! As long as my queue was full and my heart was stout, I would never run short of cinema.

That first relationship started hot but fizzled fast, a victim of Netflix’s caprice. The best DVDs were unavailable. Customer service was spotty. It all came to a head the dark night of “The Limey.” As I neared the climax of Steven Soderbergh’s fractured thriller — What happened to Jenny?! — the DVD began skipping, sending sound and picture skittering across the screen. At first I thought Soderbergh’s jumpy editing had just gone feverish, but I soon realized Netflix had sent me a faulty disc. Left with no recourse at 1 a.m., I angrily broke off our courtship, canceling my Netflix service. To its credit, the company let me go gracefully, refunding a month’s charges and apologizing for the snafu.

In 2002 Netflix sent me an e-mail. Everything would be different now, Netflix said. Its growing pains were over. Netflix had shipping centers across the country, thousands more DVDs, efficient customer service. Kozmo was gone, the home-delivery bubbles had burst, but Netflix was thriving. Come back to me, Netflix said. Come back to me.

I was a fool. I came back.

Our second relationship was stormy and dramatic. I stormed out of Netflix two short weeks later when every movie on my queue was unavailable. Netflix couldn’t keep its dignity this time; it begged me, pleaded with me, told me it could change. Did I only want two movies at a time? Did I want a lower price? Netflix’s beseeching wore at me until, late one night, I agreed to renew for one more month. The next morning I awoke gasping — I was trapped! In the cold light of day I sent Netflix packing. I thought I’d never hear from the company again.

Last fall, my wife and I found ourselves frustrated by the lack of video stores in our part of Manhattan, so far uptown that our friends refer to our neighborhood as “Canada.” Our only video store had been Papo’s Video, a mediocre joint notable only for its bandwagon marketing; done up in Blockbuster’s blues and golds, with a Blockbusteresque font in its logo, Papo’s was yet another in the long line of classic New York fakes, immortalized in “Coming to America’s” “McDowell’s.” (“They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs.”)

Then Papo’s closed. And I found that the only thing worse than having a mediocre video store in my neighborhood was having no video store at all. It was then, at the moment of my greatest weakness, that Netflix swooped in.

Oh, it all started out great. Netflix really had changed — we received every DVD in a day, and they had nearly everything I wanted in stock, and the DVDs were in good condition. We watched “Capturing the Friedmans” and “All the Real Girls” and “Thirteen.” I developed a sudden craving for “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” and two days later its sweet melodies arrived at my door. Just like Satan and Saddam, me and Netflix were gonna make it work!

But then: “Friday Night.” “Raising Victor Vargas.” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” And that’s when things went bad.

One’s a stately erotic reverie by French auteur Claire Denis; one’s a hardscrabble tale of growing up in Washington Heights; one was the highest-grossing independent film of all time before Jesus came along. I ordered them because I thought I should, or because they were impressive-sounding, or because it’s really easy to click “Add to my queue” on a Web site. They arrived en masse almost four months ago and haven’t budged from atop my cable box since.

“Friday Night.” “Raising Victor Vargas.” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” I know I should watch them — I hear each is really good, in its own way — but I managed to pick the three movies most perfectly calibrated to inspire my lack of interest. I know I should mail them back and move on with my life, but that would be admitting defeat. I have already paid an average of $26.60 for the privilege of watching each of these DVDs gather dust atop my cable box, their bright red postage-paid envelopes growing dimmer by the day.

Netflix and I have reached the heat death of our once-sizzling relationship. It feels like work watching all these movies. It feels like an obligation to keep this relationship alive.

With Netflix’s rate increasing to $21.99 next week, I’ve resolved to give our relationship a little break. That’s a lot to pay to not watch movies. And I just got a come-hither e-mail from another good-looking DVD-rental site, the one run by Wal-Mart. I know its selection isn’t as broad, but it might be nice to pay a mere $18.76 to not watch movies for a change.

And hey, who knows? Maybe it’ll really work out between Wal-Mart and me. It’s a good company, with decent selection and a good delivery infrastructure. Its site is attractive and functional. It seems to really respect me as a person.

Maybe this time it’ll be different.

Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away,” is in the wrong shape. Grumpy and sour, 10-year-old Chihiro whines at her parents about their move to a new town; timid and apprehensive, she clings so that her mother, irritated, shakes her off. Trapped in the spirit world in which the film takes place, Chihiro is belittled by the staff of the bathhouse where she gets a job. “What a dope!” one character says. “You’re the most pathetic little girl I’ve ever seen,” another says, laughing, “a stinking, useless weakling.”

It’s a lot of abuse for a 10-year-old girl to take, but the wonder of “Spirited Away” is that Chihiro believably transforms from “a lazy spoiled crybaby” to a tough, resilient little girl whose determination suggests the strong woman she will one day become. It’s easy to praise Miyazaki’s movie for its visual delights — the radish spirits and river gods, the ancient bathhouse floating on the sea, the scenes of flight (as in most every Miyazaki film) so thrillingly realized — but it’s also easy to forget how touching a portrait it is of a modern child learning to live within herself, learning to be the right shape. Chihiro faces her fears and overcomes them, and finds within herself a strength she’d previously been unaware she had. And she does it so subtly that only afterward do you realize how profound that transition has been.

Late in the film, Chihiro takes a ride on a train through the cities and neighborhoods of this spirit world, the cars gliding swiftly across the endless sea, Joe Hisaishi’s lovely score a counterpoint as day turns to dusk outside. Shadowy riders disembark, and the train slips past another little girl, waiting patiently on a platform in the pale evening. Chihiro’s going to return something her friend Haku stole, and to apologize on his behalf, but she’s also headed out of childhood and into adolescence. It’s not a trip to be embarked upon lightly, and that’s what makes the sequence so moving, not only for children but also for adults. For I remember a time in my life when I yearned to be grown-up even as I reveled in childhood, never realizing what would be lost when I moved on. “The train used to run in both directions,” Kamaji the boilerman warns Chihiro as he hands her the delicate paper tickets. “But these days, it’s a one-way ride.”

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

The Yankees swear to a man that they don’t pay attention to the Curse. But as every baseball fan knows, it’s been a long, long time since the Yankees won a World Series. The last time the Yanks won it all, the Bronx was part of New York City; Bill Clinton wasn’t on the $2,000,000 bill but he was in the White House; and the White House wasn’t even on the moon!

It was back in 2000 that the Yankees defeated the New York Mets (now the Brooklyn Hipsters), 4 games to 1, to win their last World Series. The Yanks got to the Series twice more in the next three years and appeared to be a contender for years to come … but then came The Trade. The team’s owner, George Steinbrenner — a name forever accompanied, in the Bronx, by a ceremonial spitting on the ground — traded second baseman Alfonso Soriano to the Texas Rangers for shortstop Alex Rodriguez.

Think about it! The Yankees traded away the greatest player in the history of baseball: the all-time home run and batting average champ; the only man ever to hit .500 in a season; the man who revolutionized fielding so much that most fans have no idea there haven’t always been three infielders; the three-term U.S. senator from Texas; the president (thanks to the Schwarzenegger Amendment of 2011, of course) who brought peace to the Middle East. And who did they get in return? Alex Rodriguez.

Don’t get me wrong. Rodriguez was an excellent third baseman with good pop. But on his first year with the Yankees, his celebrated bungle — the A-Rod Chop, which snuffed out the Yankees’ rally in Game Six of the 2004 American League Championship Series — became legendary in Curse of the Yankees lore and Rodriguez never lived it down. Desperate to get out of New York but stuck there because no other team could absorb his then-astronomical salary of $22 million, Rodriguez retired in 2006.

Every time despondent members of Yankee Nation get their hopes up, a hanging spitter or a malfunctioning umpire will send the Yanks home yet again. From 2008 to 2022, the Yankees finished second to the Rangers in the American League East-Central race every year. In 2064, the Yankees reached the World Series, only to lose Game 7 to the Milwaukee Brewers when Tim Raines III let a fly ball bounce off his glove over the 650 mark on the center field wall. Mention any of these names to a gloomy Yankees fan and watch him burst into tears: Lucky Kent (2078), Jill Ruckner (2086), BooneClone X-14 (2103).

Could 2104 be the year? Could the Yankees finally overcome their foolish mistakes, the weight of history, and the desperation of their fans to win it all? They’re due; in fact, they’re overdue. The two teams with the next-longest World Series droughts are the Cubs and the Red Sox, who of course jointly won it all in the famed World Series Tie of 2042. Despite tonight’s presidential debate and worldwide Alfonso Soriano Day festivities, the eyes of the world’s sports fans will be on Torre Field tonight as a new Yankees team tries to find a way to Reverse the Curse.

Will they pull it off? As they used to say before all air came in pill form, don’t hold your breath.

I’ll answer a few select questions about the show’s aims and methods, to give new viewers an idea of what kind of show to expect. I’ll briefly synopsize Seasons 1 and 2, and let you know where the series stands at the top of Season 3. And I’ll present “The Wire’s” rogues’ gallery: bios of the major players in David Simon’s Baltimore. You can read that straight through for a deeper understanding of the Season 1 and 2 synopses, or simply use it as a reference work, dipping into it when an unfamiliar face appears onscreen.

I don’t even like cop shows. Why should I watch “The Wire”?
“The Wire” wears the trappings of a simple police show, but, as Simon notes in his commentary on the Season 1 DVD, the show is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how, regardless of what you are committed to, whether you’re a cop, a longshoremen, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge, a lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”

Big talk for a cop show. But “The Wire” backs Simon up in its choice of subject matter from season to season. Season 1 focused on Baltimore’s mostly black West Side housing projects and the drug trade eating them from within. The Baltimore Police Department was shown to be just as compromising to its members as any other institution — including a high-level drug organization. Season 2 shifted from the ghetto to the waterfront, focusing on corruption and desperation in the mostly white Baltimore’s dockworkers’ unions. And Season 3 seems to be focusing on the genteel-yet-mean world of Baltimore politics, showing once again how all involved are forced to play “the game.”

True, the spine of each season is a Baltimore police investigation, one that leads inevitably to electronic surveillance — “the wire.” But those police — good and bad police, drunks and womanizers, brutes and thinking men, careerists and self-destructors — dig up the ways that legal and illegal Baltimore talk to each other every day, and their stories make powerful arguments about the war on drugs and the failure of the American dream.

Look, that’s great and all, but is the show actually fun to watch?
Absolutely, and this is where Simon’s declaration in his introduction to the book “The Wire: Truth Be Told” — that character and plot in “The Wire” come second to “picking a fight” — seems a little suspect. “The Wire” is not compulsively watchable because of its powerful arguments about the war on drugs and the failure of the American dream. It’s compulsively watchable despite those arguments, and because it offers rich, deep characters; believable, funny scenes; and complex, innovative plots. Characters like Omar, the stick-up “homothug” who’s dead-set on avenging the death of his lover, who’s never pointed his gun at a “citizen” but won’t hesitate to blow away a drug dealer, while whistling “The Farmer in the Dell.” Scenes like the one in this Sunday’s episode that captured the awkwardness when co-workers run into each other outside the office — only in this case, the “co-workers” are two West Side drug dealers and two narcotics cops, all with dates on their arms, coming face-to-face in the lobby of a Baltimore movie theater. And plots like Season 2′s, in which Frank Sobotka got his hands dirty in an attempt to save his dying union — and realized what a small part of the world of crime his operation was, just as his union’s place in the world of working Baltimore was shrinking to nothing. The unraveling of this union boss’s plans as the cops closed in on one side, and the thugs closed in on the other, was painful to watch, but it also offered viewers the crackerjack thrill of tangled plots coming to full heads of steam at the same time.

Is the show really about wiretapping? The opening credits show a bunch of shots of, like, people sitting around wearing headphones. That seems boring.
The wiretap promised by the show’s title and credits didn’t even get set up until the seventh episode of the 13-episode first season. So no, the show isn’t specifically about wiretaps, any more than it’s specifically about drugs or housing projects or dockworkers. But wiretaps do serve as a useful metaphor for what the show hopes to do: As wiretaps provide the cops in “The Wire” a look into a secret world, so does “The Wire” offer us that same look into places most television viewers never see.

Do you need to know all about Baltimore to understand what’s going on in “The Wire”?
Though native Marylanders will enjoy the references to Chesapeake Bay crabs, Natty Bo and obscure Orioles catchers, background knowledge of the history of Baltimore is not necessary to follow the day-to-day events of “The Wire.” As Simon notes, the woes the series describes are happening in pretty much every city in America.

Do the mostly white, middle-class writers and producers of “The Wire” have the right to tell these inner-city stories?
That’s a touchy question, and one the show’s staff faces head-on. In addition to Simon and a few others who have been with the show for a while, “The Wire’s” writing staff includes a number of acclaimed crime writers — Washington’s George Pelecanos, New Jersey’s Richard Price and Boston’s Dennis Lehane. To a person, the writers of “The Wire” have spent their careers researching and writing about the lives of those entrenched in America’s cities, black and white, scraping by and falling through the cracks, cops and robbers, citizens and soldiers. Simon gives thanks that his show is not a Hollywood vision of the inner city — his staff are mostly city guys, tough guys, who know the turf pretty well — but he recognizes that there’s always going to be a disconnect. “We are professional writers and paid as such,” he writes, “and it is one thing to echo the voices of longshoremen and addicts, detectives and dealers, quite another to claim those voices as your own.”

So the answer? Maybe they don’t have that right. But they’re doing it anyway, and the stories that result are really, really good.

So what happened so far?
SEASON 1
Season 1 focused on an investigation into Avon Barksdale’s drug empire in the housing projects of West Baltimore. It all begins when a homicide detective named Jimmy McNulty mouths off to a Baltimore judge about the inadequacy of the department’s efforts against the violence inherent in the West Baltimore drug trade. The judge raises a stink, and soon McNulty, on his boss’s bad side, finds himself stuck in a poorly supported investigative unit headed by Lt. Cedric Daniels, looking into the Barksdale ring.

While at first the unit, buried in the courthouse basement, seems staffed by drunks and also-rans, Daniels manages to weed out the bad cops, install a few good ones, and make real progress. Three narcotics cops, Herc, Carver and Kima, make great progress in identifying the street-level operators in the crew, thanks in large part to information provided by a street informant, Bubbles. And back in the basement, Prez and Freamon, two cops long since given up for useless, expertly decipher an array of payphone wiretaps and pager clones to learn more and more about the nuts and bolts of the Barksdale crew.

Meanwhile, McNulty has reached out to a lone wolf named Omar who makes his money robbing drug dealers, one of the show’s great, almost mythic creations. Because his lover has been tortured and killed by Barksdale soldiers in retaliation for an especially bold heist, Omar wants revenge, and he gives McNulty information on the Barksdale inner circle. He also pays the head of the West Side drug cartel, Proposition Joe, for Avon Barksdale’s pager number, and nearly succeeds in killing Avon.

Within the Barksdale crew, disbelief reigns that the police are on to the crew’s modes of communication — until a major stash house is hit, at which point Avon’s second-in-command, Stringer Bell, declares all pagers and pay phones off-limits. He distributes new cellphones to everyone, including Avon’s nephew, D’Angelo, the soft-hearted head of the trade in the low-rise projects. As the net closes in, Avon sends D’Angelo on a run to New York for a new stash, unaware that Daniels’ unit has placed a camera in the wall of Avon’s office.

Pressure from above to wrap up the case — which, in the eyes of Daniels’ superior, Ervin Burrell, has grown unwieldy, including probing campaign contributions to Baltimore politicians — forces the unit to make arrests and file charges. A disgruntled D’Angelo, upset because young Wallace, who wasn’t cut out for the life, has been killed on Stringer Bell’s order, accepts a deal from McNulty and Asst. State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, but then backs out under pressure from his family. Without Wallace, a prominent witness, and without D’Angelo, the case accomplishes much less than the unit hoped: D’Angelo gets saddled with most of the resulting jail time, while Avon gets off with a light sentence, and Stringer Bell gets off completely. Only one Barksdale lieutenant gets saddled with any murders — because he cops to every single one, taking a hit for the organization. The season ends with Omar on a bus to Philly; Avon and D’Angelo, plus several others, in jail; Stringer running the drug business, same as ever; and McNulty busted down to a crap gig on a police boat.

SEASON 2
Season 2 continued many of Season 1′s stories while opening up a new front: the stevedores’ union at the Baltimore docks, where union boss Frank Sobotka, his nephew Nick, and his son Ziggy have been misdirecting shipping containers to smugglers. When one of the cans turns up with 13 suffocated Eastern European prostitutes inside, the law comes crashing down on Sobotka and his union. Daniels, looking to work his way back up from the evidence room he was exiled to after challenging his higher-ups in the Barksdale case, reassembles his investigative team, including a desperate-for-dry-land McNulty.

Their wiretaps reveal a connection between the union and an international smuggling ring led by a mysterious figure named “The Greek” — the same ring responsible for bringing in most of the dope distributed to the East Side, Proposition Joe’s territory. But this isn’t just graft for profit on the part of the dockworkers; Frank Sobotka is using the money he earns from his dirty deeds for campaign contributions and consultants in a last-ditch attempt to revitalize the Baltimore docks. But he overplays his hand with The Greek, and faces a tragic end. And due once again to institutional foolishness, the case ends in frustration for Daniels’ unit; they determine that the man responsible for the “dead girls in the can” has been killed by higher-ups, who have then skipped town, tipped off by the FBI that the investigation is closing in.

Meanwhile, on the West Side, Stringer Bell finds his methods at odds with the wishes of his boss in the slammer, and goes behind Avon’s back to have D’Angelo killed — making it look convincingly like a suicide. Stringer also, unknown to Avon, allows Prop Joe’s West Siders to make inroads on Barksdale territory in exchange for much-needed product.

The season ends with the granary pier, so coveted by Sobotka for the ships it could bring to a revitalized port, converted to condominiums; Daniels allowed to make his investigative unit a permanent fixture; Avon upset with his right-hand man; and Proposition Joe’s East Side dealers encroaching on Barksdale territory.

SEASON 3
At the opening of Season 3, the project towers come down, shaking up business in Baltimore. Stringer Bell uses his business school training to bring “Robert’s Rules of Order” to Barksdale meetings; Omar is still sticking up the Barksdale crew; and Daniels’ investigative team is focusing on Prop Joe, hoping to get at him through one of his dealers, Cheese. Meanwhile, a young City Councilman, Tommy Carcetti, is stirring up trouble in the corridors of power, and some legendary muscle, Cutty, has just returned from the joint.

Hey, who the hell are all those people?
Good question. Those synopses should give you enough background to jump into Season 3. But there’ll come a time when you want to know more detail about these characters — especially because “The Wire” isn’t big on exposition. Here’s a character-by-character breakdown of “The Wire,” getting you up to speed on who’s who to help you make the connections as you start on Season 3. You can read the list straight through, or use it as a reference when someone new shows up on your TV screen.

This character list doesn’t include some of the characters from Season 2, because it’s become clear in interviews with Simon and others involved in the show that the events on the docks were a standalone story, and few of those characters will make return visits. It’s a shame to lose those great characters; the Sobotkas, The Greek, and especially Beatrice “Beadie” Russell (Amy Ryan), the soft-spoken port officer who, against all her expectations, learned how to be “real police.” But their reappearance anytime soon is unlikely, and so I’m leaving them out.

Likewise, corpses don’t make the list. The deaths of Wallace and D’Angelo will likely affect “The Wire” for some time to come, but on a show whose creator has disavowed flashbacks ever since HBO pushed him to include one in the pilot, it’s unlikely you’re ever going to need to know what they looked like.

The character intros below are helpfully divided into five groups: Police, the West Side, the East Side, the Free Agents, and the Pols.

POLICE
Deputy Commissioner Rawls (John Doman)
Pugnacious and demanding, Rawls oversees Homicide and, at the beginning of the third season, has been elevated to deputy commissioner. Rawls’ longest-standing grudge is against Jimmy McNulty, who first raised Rawls’ ire by failing to keep his mouth shut about Homicide’s inability to go after the big players in West Baltimore’s drug trade, and has never lived it down. It was Rawls who sent McNulty to boat duty after the Barksdale case at the end of Season 1, and who did everything he could to keep McNulty off Daniels’ team during the investigation of the docks (Season 2). Now Rawls spends his days bawling out cops who can’t connect the dots.

Major Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom)
An extremely minor character in Season 2, Colvin appears to be shaping up as one of the primaries in Season 3. His officers, including Herc and Carver, cover the Western District. As the season opens, Colvin, fed up with the never-ending battle against low-level drug dealers, announces to his police that they’re going to go about things a different way.

Major Valchek (Al Brown)
A stubborn crank who instigated Season 2′s investigation of the docks in order to gain an advantage over Frank Sobotka in a petty debate over who — his police union or Sobotka’s longshoreman’s union — could finance a bigger church window. That the investigation ruined Sobotka’s life seemed to bother Valchek not at all. Valchek also managed to alienate his son-in-law, Prez, to such a degree that Prez hauled off and slugged him in front of the entire team. As Season 3 begins, Valchek sets up a private meeting between Commissioner Burrell and Councilman Tommy Carcetti.

Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick)
Clean-cut, hard-assed and intelligent, Daniels got placed by Burrell on the Barksdale case with strict instructions: Keep the case small, come in with a few arrests, and you’ll be on your way to major. Instead, Daniels oversaw the investigation’s growth, incurring the wrath of his superiors and the politicians — including State Sen. Clay Davis — whose campaign contributions his staff checked out. His reward for the Barksdale case was a demotion to the evidence room, and it looked like his path was clear: resign, take the bar, and become a big-firm lawyer, the path pushed by his ambitious wife, Marla Daniels, whose own political ambitions may soon conflict with his interoffice politics. But he was drawn into Season 2′s dockworker investigation, spearheading that for Valchek in hopes of bringing himself “up from the basement,” much to his wife’s annoyance. Season 3 sees him leading a new unit specializing in large-scale investigations, but estranged from his wife, leasing a small apartment, and sleeping with Rhonda Pearlman.

Asst. State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy)
Though she’s officially a state’s attorney, Pearlman is in the police section because she spends her time coordinating the legal side of the various police investigations. It’s she who got D’Angelo Barksdale to agree to testify against his uncle (before his mother convinced him otherwise), and who worked out deals with Frank and Nick Sobotka as well. A long-running on-and-off affair with Jimmy McNulty (she was at least one of the reasons his marriage fell apart) seems currently off, as at the beginning of Season 3, she seduced Daniels.

Herc & Carver (Domeneck Lombardozzi and Seth Gilliam)
Always seen as a pair, Herc and Carver have worked together for years, in Narcotics, on Daniels’ special investigative units, and now under Bunny Colvin in the Western District. Working with Daniels taught them that busting heads wasn’t the only way to work a case, but both officers got frustrated when they felt they were being used for simple-minded busywork and left Daniels’ unit at the end of Season 2. (Carver’s relationship with Daniels is especially fraught; Daniels caught him snitching to Burrell during the initial Barksdale investigation.) The two are not above a little healthy corruption; they’ve been known to pocket wads of cash found in stash houses and fabricate informants to justify unauthorized wiretaps. They are given showpiece girlfriends from time to time, but basically function as a funny, bickering married couple.

Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West)
The heart, soul and oft-impaired nervous system of “The Wire” is McNulty, the fiercely smart, stupidly fierce investigator whose ill-thought-out bitching to Judge Phelan set the events of Season 1 into motion. While he seems to fail at most things in his life, he’s a cop who gets his teeth in a case and shakes it until something real falls out. His passion for the Barksdale case pushed the investigative unit to greater heights and pushed Daniels to care about what seemed like a career dead-end. Exiled to the marine unit after the Barksdale case, he found a way back into the building at Homicide by bringing in Omar as a witness on an old case going to trial. From there, he wreaked havoc on his old partners, sticking Rawls with 14 Jane Does by proving that the dead prostitutes belonged in his jurisdiction; then, with Daniels’ help, he returned to the investigative team. The scene that perfectly encapsulates Jimmy McNulty occurred late in Season 2: fresh off drunk-dialing ex-wife Elena from a bar, McNulty misjudges a turn in the rain and hits a bridge abutment, smashing off his side-view mirror. He stumbles from the car, maps out the turn he knew he made with his hand, gets back in the car, backs up, and, radio blaring, careens through the turn again, this time ripping up the car’s entire right side. It’s that stubbornness, that refusal to be wrong, that makes Jimmy McNulty good police. Sure, he cares about the lives ruined by every homicide — a little. But it’s ego that drives the best detectives, as “The Wire” is one of the few shows to make clear.

Bunk (Wendell Pierce)
Based on a real Baltimore detective, Bunk is a cigar-chomping, affable, hardworking homicide cop who rarely serves as a check on McNulty’s worse impulses. Though he has his devilish side, Bunk, unlike McNulty, has managed to stay on the brass’s good side — in no small part by steering clear, whenever possible, of Daniels’ investigative units. But when Bunk got stuck with the Jane Does in Season 2, he found himself working alongside the wiretap crew, trying to crack the case of the dead girls in the can. He cleared the cases — the man responsible had himself been killed — and headed back to Homicide, which is where we find him at the beginning of Season 3. Bunk is married to a wife we’ve never met, but we have seen him make plays for a number of women in bars; in one memorable moment, McNulty had to coax Bunk out of a woman’s bathroom where, clad only in her robe, Bunk was carefully setting fire to his own clothes in a drunken effort to destroy any evidence that he’d been there.

Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn)
“Greggs seemed almost too admirable in the early going,” writes acclaimed crime writer Laura Lippman in an essay in “The Wire: Truth Be Told.” “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Super-Lesbian!” (Side note: it’s hard to imagine any other series’ coffee-table book offering six pages to the creator’s girlfriend to smack down the series’ treatment of its female characters.) Indeed, Simon has ruefully referred to the women he writes as “men with tits,” and in the opening episodes of “The Wire,” ballsy Kima was no different. But her character deepened when, unexpectedly, she was forced into a position of weakness: in a blown buy-and-bust, Kima (ironically dressed in frilly civilianwear) got shot twice, prompting a fight for her life and, for a time, the end of her work on the street. Her partner, Cheryl, terrified of losing Kima, insisted on the move to desk work. But through the dockworkers case, with Cheryl pregnant and angry at Kima’s return to action, Kima’s dissatisfaction with the trappings of domesticity increased; life at home couldn’t compare to the excitement and fulfillment of working a case in Daniels’ special investigation unit, of which Kima is a critical member. Now, in Season 3, Kima’s work life is peaking. But life with a baby isn’t for her — she can’t even remember the word “fontanel” — and ditches Cheryl and the baby late one night for a trip to a local bar and the temptation inside.

Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters)
“You’re real police,” a surprised McNulty said to Lester Freamon in the middle of the Barksdale case, after the pawnshop cop revealed that he’d snagged D’Angelo’s pager number. Up until then, the soft-spoken Freamon had spent his time sitting at his desk, sanding antique dollhouse miniatures, but it turns out that the man was once a McNulty-like loose cannon — exiled 13 years ago to the crappiest crap job in the department. But he proved himself on the Barksdale case, finding the only known photo of Avon Barksdale on an old Golden Gloves poster, and coaxing a sweet-natured dancer at Avon’s strip club to help the investigation — and into a relationship as well. Over the course of the unit’s first two cases, Freamon also served as Daniels’ conscience, letting him know when politics were getting in the way of good police work, and as Prez’s mentor, helping the young screw-up realize his strengths as an officer lie in the details.

Detective Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost)
Only because he’s Valchek’s son-in-law did Prez keep his badge after an unfortunate incident in which he shot up his own car. As punishment, though, he was sent down to the Barksdale investigation, where he promptly drunkenly beat on a project kid so hard the kid went blind in one eye. From there on out, Prez was sentenced to life underground, logging the pager calls, listening to the wiretaps, and keeping the records for the case. But it turned out that this kind of detective work was what Prez did best, and after he cracked the code the Barksdale gang used on their pagers, the rest of the unit began to offer him some grudging respect. Prez soon became the organizational master of the team, and in both the Barksdale case and the dockworkers case, showed a flair for wiretapping, record-keeping, and code-cracking that made him proud to be a police for the first time in a long time. That pride crossed swords with his father-in-law’s dismissive attitude toward the end of Season 2, when Valchek pushed the unit to a quick and unhappy bust, and Prez’s fist met his father-in-law’s nose. As Season 3 begins, Prez’s handwritten apology has gotten him back on Daniels’ team.

THE WEST SIDE
Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris)
Avon Barksdale is a different kind of TV kingpin: the quiet kind. “It’s not a rap video,” says Simon on his DVD commentary. “Flash brings police. The guys who are the most serious, moving-weight drug dealers in Baltimore … they would roll up on a corner and you wouldn’t be able to tell them from the other five or six guys standing with them.” But Barksdale’s cover got blown when his nephew D’Angelo got off a murder rap thanks to a last-second change of heart from a witness. McNulty, pissed to see a slam-dunk case end in acquittal, mouthed off to the judge about Avon, and the next thing Avon knew, his phones were tapped, his lieutenants were getting hauled in, and his second-in-command, Stringer Bell, could barely keep his street business, with Omar robbing his stash all the time. Avon’s revenge — the torture and death of Omar’s lover — came back to bite him when Omar killed one of his men, dimed another for a murder, and came within seconds of killing Avon himself. Wiretaps and hidden cameras eventually caught up with Avon, and though the cops never pinned a murder rap on him, they did lock him up for a few years on drug charges. In Season 2, Avon ran his prison, ate KFC whenever he wanted, and got his sentence lowered for cooperation in the investigation of a crime he himself instigated. Throughout his term, Barksdale reached out to his nephew D’Angelo, and was heartbroken when D’Angelo apparently hanged himself in the prison library. When news came through that Proposition Joe was making a move on Barksdale turf, Avon called down from NYC the scary Brother Mouzone to crack some heads — unaware Prop Joe’s people were in the West Side on Stringer’s invitation, since Stringer had all the territory but none of the good dope. As Season 3 begins, Avon is happily counting the days until his release, unaware of the extent to which Stringer has changed the way his organization works.

Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba)
Charismatic, ruthless, and Six Sigma certified, Stringer Bell runs the Barksdale gang with a combination of murderous rage and MBA theory. Despite being responsible for the deaths of many, Stringer escaped prosecution in the initial Barksdale raids when the witness who could tie him to Omar’s lover’s death, young Wallace, was killed. In Season 2, Bell made a number of moves without Avon’s knowledge: Facing a severe shortage of product, he reached out to Proposition Joe, offering him a few project towers in exchange for access to his high-quality supply. He told Omar that Brother Mouzone was responsible for his lover’s murder in an attempt to light Avon’s man up. And, most damning of all, when he believed that D’Angelo was drawing away from the family and the organization, Stringer had D’Angelo killed — and had the death made to look like a suicide.

Maurice Levy (Michael Kostroff)
“I’ll probably have my B’nai B’rith membership revoked,” over the character of Levy, Simon jokes in his DVD commentary. But Levy, the venal, complicit attorney for the Barksdale clan, is based on several drug lawyers Simon and his frequent writing partner (and former BPD cop) Ed Burns knew in the 1980s and 1990s. Levy is a masterful defense attorney who feigns ignorance of his clients’ dirty deeds while keeping the organization as street-legal as possible.

Bodie (J.D. Williams)
We’ve watched Bodie grow up through the first two seasons of “The Wire,” going from an anonymous foot soldier in the Barksdale army — the kind of kid who, on his first trip out of town, didn’t understand why his favorite Baltimore radio station was fading out and some other station was fading in — to a trusted corner man. Originally stationed to the low-rises to which D’Angelo got exiled after his initial acquittal, Bodie became a project legend when he slugged a cop during a bust, walked out of juvenile detention, and hitched back to Baltimore. When it became clear that Wallace was a liability to the crew, Stringer Bell gave Bodie the responsibility of rubbing the boy out. But things started going awry for Bodie in Season 2; his crew got into a turf battle with another, and when a bystander was killed, the police cracked down on the corners. Then Bodie failed to adequately dispose of the guns. Now, in Season 3, Bodie, who is much more comfortable busting shit up than making business propositions, is having trouble brokering a relationship with Marlo.

Poot (Tray Chaney)
Poot is Bodie’s right hand. He was Wallace’s best friend, and the scene in which Bodie and Poot shot Wallace was one of the hardest to watch in the whole series. As Bodie pointed the gun at a crying Wallace, and told him to “be a man,” but couldn’t pull the trigger, it was Poot’s cry of “Do it!” that finally got Bodie to fire. Then Poot silently took the gun and, with tears in his eyes, finished the job.

Marlo (Jamie Hector)
We don’t know much about Marlo yet; he’s a corner man for another drug crew near Barksdale territory. He rejected Bodie’s overtures for a business partnership in no uncertain terms — his words were cool, but the golf club he likes to swing around drove the point home.

THE EAST SIDE
Proposition Joe (Robert Chew)
We first met Prop Joe during Season 1, at the annual East Side-West Side basketball game, where his squad faced off against Avon Barksdale’s West Side team. Prop Joe had better ringers and won a hotly contested (and six-figure wagered) game. For the most part, Prop Joe is happy to coexist with the Barksdale crew, but his relationship with them became more complicated when Stringer Bell’s supply went south. Joe agreed to let Stringer in on his good shit — some of which, incidentally, came from the Sobotka-led connection at the docks — in exchange for four of the high-rise towers. As Season 3 opens, the towers are gone, and relations are still uneasy between the East Side and the West.

Cheese (Method Man)
Just one level below Prop Joe, Cheese recently became the target of Daniels’ unit when a tapped phone call revealed him crying into the phone about having to shoot his “dawg.” Unfortunately, it turned out he was talking about a beloved pit bull he put down for acting cur in a dogfight, and his resultant arrest gave the unit no more than a bunch of dead wiretaps.

THE FREE AGENTS
Omar (Michael Williams)
Charismatic, daring, and murderous, Omar first showed up when he and his lover, Brandon, robbed a Barksdale stash. The resultant revenge torture and killing of Brandon drove Omar on a vendetta against all those in the Barksdale crew responsible — from the triggermen to the generals at the top, Avon and Stringer Bell. While pursuing revenge against the Barksdales the old-fashioned way, Omar also contacted McNulty, offering his help in pinning some old murders on Barksdale soldiers. In Season 2, Omar took the stand in one of those cases, offering up his personal philosophy as justification for testifying: “I ain’t never pointed my gun at no citizen.” He robs drug dealers, not civilians, and sticks to that code of honor. When Stringer told him that Brother Mouzone was responsible for Brandon’s torture, Omar found the previously invincible Mouzone and put a bullet in his stomach. But when Mouzone calmly explained that Omar had been misled, Omar, recognizing the truth in his words, called 911 and left Mouzone alive. As Season 3 begins, Omar is still sticking up Barksdale men, employing a number of disguises and a couple of female accomplices as well.

Bubbles (Andre Royo)
Based on a real Baltimore junkie, scammer and informant for whom David Simon wrote a unique obituary in the late 1980s, Bubbles has made a life providing on-target information for cops — especially his buddies Kima and McNulty, whom Bubbles calls “McNutty.” He was driven to snitch on Barksdale crew members when his HIV-positive partner-in-crime, Johnny, got badly beaten for running a scam. As Season 3 opens, Bubbles and Johnny seem to be close to rock-bottom, with Bubbles especially despairing. Bubbles has flirted with going straight before, but it’s never panned out.

Cutty (Chad Coleman)
Just released after a 14-year stretch in prison, Dennis “Cutty” Wise seems to be a major character in Season 3, though all we’ve seen him do thus far is drift aimlessly from job to job — some legit, some not. It is as yet unclear whether his allegiances lie with Avon Barksdale, who offered to hook him up, or somewhere else.

THE POLS
Commissioner Burrell (Frankie Faison)
Just ascended to the Commissioner’s desk, Burrell functions as one of the heavies of the story, though, he isn’t a particularly evil man — he just looks out for himself, at the expense of, at times, the department he’s meant to head. Burrell has a history with Daniels in particular: it was he who gave Daniels the initial mandate to keep the Barksdale investigation small, and he who stuck Daniels in the evidence control room when the probe got unwieldy. Now he’s overseeing a police department in crisis, and a recently arranged meeting with Councilman Tommy Carcetti has shown Burrell what a little under-the-table dealing — behind the mayor’s back — can accomplish for his department.

Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen)
An ambitious young city councilman who realizes that a white politician doesn’t have much future in Baltimore politics unless he makes some noise, Carcetti began Season 3 by approaching Commissioner Burrell and offering him some behind-the-scenes help with his department.

Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)
State Sen. Davis first showed up in “The Wire” when one of his aides was picked up by Daniels’ unit carrying $20,000 in Barksdale drug money. Burrell made the problem go away, but Davis later had an angry encounter with Daniels in which he demanded to know why the Barksdale investigators were looking into campaign contributions. A steadfast Daniels told Davis that if he wasn’t doing anything illegal, he had nothing to worry about. In Season 2, we saw Davis accepting contributions from Frank Sobotka’s stevedores’ union.

Marla Daniels (Maria Broom)
Cedric Daniels’ wife is embarking on her own political career as Season 3 begins, taking on an incumbent for a City Council spot. But her annoyance with what she views as her husband’s lack of ambition has driven them apart, and he now shows up at political events for her benefit but sleeps in a bachelor apartment alone.

Bruce was at the end of his rope. The cops and the courts seemed to be on a vendetta against him. No nightclub would book him. He would soon be convicted of obscenity by the New York justices, a conviction that would stand until last December, when Bruce was pardoned by New York Gov. George Pataki. By then, of course, Bruce was long dead, driven by prosecutors, paranoia and his own heroin addiction to an overdose in August 1966.

We remember Bruce today for his struggles with the courts of California, Illinois and New York, and for his ugly death. His First Amendment battles paved the way for comedians like Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and George Carlin to address the most taboo of subjects in their own routines. But with the release of “Let the Buyer Beware,” a deluxe six-CD box set produced by Hal Willner, Bruce’s own louche comedy routines are back in the spotlight.

Much of Bruce’s act was deliberately not funny, especially late in his career, when his courthouse misadventures took over his nightclub shows. (“The Lenny Bruce Performance Film,” the only widely available video of his work, is a painful chronicle of one of his final performances, spent on a point-by-point rant against Murtagh’s opinion.) But his early routines, as captured on “Let the Buyer Beware,” reveal a rapid-fire performer who combined outrageous ad-libbing with carefully honed bits and shtick. Bruce was tireless in pointing out hypocrisy — in religion, in sex, in race relations. He cursed a blue streak, eager to exploit four-letter (and 12-letter) words for their shock value while simultaneously trying to “liberate” those words from their gutter status.

And listening to him today raises the inevitable question: Who is fighting the battles — for good and ill — that Lenny Bruce fought 40 years ago? Bruce’s trials helped assure that anyone can say “cocksucker” on a nightclub stage, but who among contemporary artists is pushing the boundaries of correctness, making people angry, and exposing hypocrisy? Here’s a list of the 10 best that are out there now, and a guide to where you can catch their incendiary humor.

10. The Upright Citizens Brigade (Matt Besser/Amy Poehler/Ian Roberts/Matt Walsh)
In their Comedy Central sketch show, the Chicago-trained quartet combined a healthy distrust of authority with a taste for unlikely juxtapositions, calling to mind Bruce’s riffs on cops, judges and polite society. But it’s with the opening of their own comedy theater in New York (where, full disclosure, I occasionally perform) that the UCB has demonstrated their debt to Bruce most clearly, by making the theater a summer haven for protesters and protest comedy. The theater offered water and shelter to RNC protesters last month, and recent shows like “The Real Real World: The White House” and Adam McKay’s satire “George Bush Is a Motherfucker” obscenely skewered public figures with a vigor Bruce would’ve appreciated. (For a show schedule, go here.)

9. Louis CK
A former writer for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Chris Rock Show,” CK’s stand-up comedy focuses on the darker sides of sex, family and society. In this way he’s reminiscent of Bruce, whose comedy sought out the darker side in almost any issue — and often went way over the line separating dark from pitch black. Plus, one would never suspect from CK’s fringe of unruly red hair and goatee that he’s the crackpot behind “Pootie Tang.” For a taste of the shifty ferocity of CK’s humor, listen as he talks about how easy it is for people to make fun of “white trash” — “Everybody laughs at them. Do you know why everybody laughs at them? Because they’re poor, that’s why. What’s funny about them is that they’re starving to death” — and hear the audience howling with laughter. Are they laughing at the sheer meanness of his humor? Or is he slyly turning the audience into the very people he’s really making fun of? (For a show schedule and humor tracks, click here.)

8. Chris Rock
Bruce didn’t shy away from race relations; several of his most plangent bits, including “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” assailed white liberal racial guilt. Years later, Chris Rock would call to mind Bruce’s race talk with this riff: “There ain’t a white man in this room that would change places with me! And I’m rich! That’s how good it is to be white. There’s a one-legged busboy in here right now saying, ‘I don’t want to change. I’m gonna ride this white thing out, see where it takes me.’” (Rock’s fourth HBO special, is out now on DVD.)

7. Eddie Izzard
In 1999, Izzard — best known as the manic stand-up behind the shows “Dress to Kill” and “Glorious” — played Bruce in a revival of Julian Barry’s 1970 play “Lenny” in London. Reviewers praised Izzard in the role — particularly for undercutting his own lighter spirits and injecting the role with the darkness and desperation Bruce himself brought to the stage. While Izzard’s own jokes are far more innocuous than Bruce’s (for a sample, go here to listen to his riff on “chickens”), their coming out of the mouth of a burly transvestite gives them a bit more zing. (For upcoming tours and appearances, go here.)

6. Sacha Baron Cohen
On HBO’s “Da Ali G Show,” British comedian Cohen combines Lenny Bruce’s willingness to deliver discomfort with Andy Kaufman’s devilish persona-swapping. As Ali G, a clueless British rapper, or as Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakh journalist, Cohen interviews unwitting subjects like Buzz Aldrin, Jim Baker and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, forcing them into rhetorical corners by force of cluelessness. In doing so Cohen’s not afraid to make himself look bad and his targets look worse: Witness the wince-inducing recent episode in which Borat got the patrons of a Tucson, Ariz., bar to enthusiastically sing along with him: “Throw the Jew down the well/ So my country can be free/ You must grab him by the horns/ And then we have a big party,” which sparked an investigation by the British FCC and raised the ire of the ADL against Cohen (who happens to be Jewish). Lenny Bruce — who noted that not only did Jews kill Christ but “we’ll kill Him again when He comes back” — would surely have approved. (HBO is airing reruns of the recent season of “Da Ali G Show” at various times; check schedules, or HBO’s Ali G home page.)

5. David Cross
One-half of the team behind HBO’s “Mr. Show” and a cast member on FOX’s “Arrested Development,” Cross brings to his stand-up a jittery energy and an impatience with hypocrisy that easily call Bruce to mind. A 1999 bit in which he railed against airlines’ Miles for Kids program — in which customers donate their frequent-flier miles so that sick children can take one last trip — is Brucean in its fury. Cross imagines a holding pen of terminally ill children inside the airport and plays a smiling idiot of a gate agent who refuses to board most of them: “Oh, there are empty seats on the plane, but you’d have to pay for those tickets, because nobody donated his miles. I’m sorry. Airline policy.” (“Arrested Development” airs Sundays at 9:30 p.m. on Fox. For Cross’ schedule and information on his comedy recordings, including the recent “It’s Not Funny,” click here.)

4. Sarah Silverman
“Relations between black and white would be greatly improved if we were more accepting of our fears and our feelings and more vocal about it,” Silverman said in interview in the Forward last year. “When my comic friends who are black [and I] joke about race and say racist shit to each other, it makes it silly, and easy to laugh at.” To that end, Silverman — one of the creators and stars of Trio’s new “Pilot Season” — wryly spouts material that, in the hands of a less sure comic, would seem truly offensive. No, screw that — even in Silverman’s hands, her jokes are truly offensive, and that’s what would make Lenny Bruce proud. Among her many Brucean moments was the one that earned her the ire of Asian-American media watchdog groups in 2001. Called to jury duty, Silverman asks a friend how to get out of it. “My friend said, ‘Why don’t you write something inappropriate on the form, like ‘I hate chinks’? But I don’t want people to think I was racist, so I just filled out the form and I wrote ‘I love chinks.’” (“Pilot Season” will rerun in its entirety Sept. 25 and 26 on Trio.)

3. Aaron McGruder
McGruder’s comic strip, “The Boondocks,” appears in about 300 newspapers every day, and as Bruce did with stand-up comedy, McGruder is reinventing a staid pop-culture medium as a forum for rabble rousing. And just as Bruce’s anger eventually took over his act, so has McGruder’s taken over the strip; in recent months, “The Boondocks” has been so vitriolic toward the current administration as to barely qualify as entertainment. When McGruder is funny, he’s hilarious, but even when he isn’t, he’s mad as hell. Particularly reminiscent of Bruce in its mixture of the personal and the political was last October’s series in which Caesar and Huey developed a plan to save the world: Get Condoleezza Rice a boyfriend. “Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn’t be so hell-bent to destroy it.” (Read “The Boondocks” here.)

2. Rick Shapiro
Of all the comics on this list, Shapiro is the one whose style most overtly apes Bruce’s; the wiry, black-clad New York comedian/performance artist unleashes stream-of-consciousness rants reminiscent of Bruce’s most wired gigs. A former junkie and prostitute — he sells bumper stickers at his shows that read “I Sucked Dick for Heroin” — Shapiro is as famous for his breakdowns on the doorstep of fame as he is for his years of success at some of the best comedy clubs in L.A. and New York. In his latest brush with fame, a plan to reenact Lenny Bruce’s 1961 Carnegie Hall show off-Broadway fell apart due to lack of financing; his manager quit the business the same week. Like Lenny Bruce, Rick Shapiro knows what it feels like when it all falls to shit. (For performance schedules click here.)

1. Howard Stern
Sure, Stern hardly makes the pop-culture meter move these days. Sure, his show has become a parody of itself, with a constant parade of saline-enhanced dim bulbs lining up for a cheap Web site plug in exchange for a few slaps on the ass from the King of All Media. Sure, Stern’s barely even funny. But remember what Lenny Bruce said: “I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.” Similarly, Howard Stern is no longer a shock jock. He’s Howard Stern. Howard Stern, the man who cost Clear Channel $1.75 million this spring; Howard Stern, the man who openly rips both George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey on the air; Howard Stern, just about the only celebrity actively fighting the FCC’s new indecency rules, the contemporary equivalent of those New York vice cops furiously scribbling in their notebooks at Lenny Bruce’s Cafe Au Go-Go shows more than 40 years ago. Like him or hate him — and I myself can’t stand to listen to more than three minutes of his show — you have to admit that, more than any other public figure out there, Stern is following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce. Like Bruce, he’s furious about the hypocrisy of those attacking him; like Bruce, he’s obsessed with finding justice; and like Bruce, his career is coming to a flaming end before our eyes. (You can hear him here.)

In interviews yesterday arranged by G.I. Joe Veterans for Truth, a nonprofit arm of a little-known think tank called Serpentine Enterprises, the veterans — low-level G.I. Joe foot soldiers, all code-named “grunts” — were unanimous in describing Joe as an incompetent leader unfit for command and not worthy of honor. Ross, a blue laser gunner 1st class, described the ordeal he was put through during the celebrated incident in which the entire male leadership of the Joe team was hypnotized by the Baroness and her Conch of the Sirens.

“Our entire platoon was ordered to attack Cobra base just to free all these addlepated G.I. Joes,” Ross said. “We risked our lives to save the Joes — not the other way around.” During the pitched battle, Ross disarmed and captured three Cobra soldiers by shooting a nearby tree with his blue laser gun, causing the tree to fall on the enemy, trapping them. “I was dodging red lasers left and right,” Ross added. “G.I. Joe said he’ll fight for freedom wherever there’s trouble. That was a lie.”

Another veteran, G.I. Joe Air Combat pilot Matthew Albers, noted that his squad was called in as air support when G.I. Joe allowed Cobra to take over Fort Knox. “This Zartan fellow disguised himself as the general in charge of the fort,” Albers said, “and G.I. Joe was completely fooled. We had to scramble a dozen planes to attack a United States Army base, just because Joe couldn’t see through a dime-store mask.”

Albers’ F-14 was shot down by a Cobra red laser cannon; the pilot and co-pilot had only seconds to eject and parachute to safety before the plane exploded. “Luckily,” said Albers, “we escaped with only minor injuries.”

His eyes misted up as he recalled the carnage that terrible day. “Eleven American soldiers suffered minor injuries at Fort Knox,” he said. “Was it worth it?”

After G.I. Joe retook Fort Knox, Albers added, every major Cobra officer escaped, including Zartan, Buzzer, Maj. Bludd, and Cobra Commander. “Didn’t catch a one. We heard them cursing Joe’s name, but they drove away in a Hiss tank. Is that never giving up or staying till the fight’s won?” he asked. “No, it isn’t.”

In a press conference today, the public faces of G.I. Joe — Hawk, Lady Jaye, Flint and Sgt. Slaughter — assembled outside G.I. Joe headquarters. They were flanked by much of the Joe team, including the mysterious ninja Snake Eyes, silent and brooding, and the Native American tracker Spirit, feeding mice to his eagle Freedom in a dignified manner. (Joe himself resides in seclusion; the few glimpses the public has been offered suggest he is a giant of a man, up to four times as tall as the rest of his soldiers.)

“None of the grunts were present for G.I. Joe organizational meetings,” Flint said. “We’re grateful to them for all they’ve done for our country, but they simply don’t understand the tough choices G.I. Joe has had to make to keep America safe over the past 40 years. He kept Cobra Commander from carving his face on the moon with a giant laser. He shut down Destro’s Texas dude ranch. He stopped the Crimson Guard from replacing all the world’s money with Cobra currency. G.I. Joe was there.”

Asked about the number of times G.I. Joe let major international terrorists escape, Flint scoffed. “Let them escape? No way. These guys have escape plans, jet packs, submarines constantly at the ready. We’re just trying to foil their plans while keeping all our men safe. That’s why the 1985-86 Cobra war was the only war ever fought by U.S. troops in which no American or enemy soldiers died.”

Flint stepped back as Sgt. Slaughter took the microphone, shouting that two of the veterans in the TV ad bought by G.I. Joe Veterans for Truth were obviously Crimson Commander twins Tomax and Xamot in disguise. Lady Jaye came to the microphone and gently dismissed Slaughter’s accusation. “We are, however, worried that the ads might be secretly funded by Cobra,” Jaye added. “You reporters should remember that politically motivated advertisements aren’t always what they seem. Often, back in the shadows, the people pulling the strings might not be interested in telling the truth.”

The reporters at the press conference, surprised, smiled and clapped each other on the back. “Now we know,” said Rick Atkinson, a correspondent for the Washington Post.

“And knowing,” said Lady Jaye, “is half the battle.”