One does see so much evil in a village

Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple in the village of St. Mary Mead senses the presence of evil. Via SilverScenesBlog.

Redhand asks in comments:

Whenever I think of "the Village" as a term applied to the mainstream press and punditry,The Village of The Prisoner comes to mind. It is a pleasant place on the surface that has the trappings of democracy and freedom of expression, but these conceal a rigid orthodoxy, and a dictatorship controlled by unidentified forces. One cannot leave, but life can be "OK" if you sell your soul.... Any idea what the etymology of the modern day "Village" is? Do its roots go back here?

That is (for younger readers too busy to check the links) the 17-episode British TV series of 1967-68 cowritten by and starring Patrick McGoohan that mystified a worldwide audience somewhat the way "Lost" did many decades later but much more enigmatically and economically, and it's a really interesting idea, but no, it doesn't check out.

I was under the impression that the great Digby had made it up, but that's not the case; I was right to remember that she'd written about it, though, particularly in one 2009 post (which brings in Marie Antoinette's fake village at Le Petit Trianon, and also references an article from Greg Sargent "On the origins and meaning of the term 'the villagers'" that seems to be locked up in the Wapo archive).

The first use of the term was actually unironic, from inside the Village itself, in no less than the famous 1998 Sally Quinn column about the vulgarity of the Clintons who came to "our town" and "trashed the place":

Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. "This is a demoralized little village," she says. "People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They're so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn't quite as sordid as this."

Yes, an act of nonmarital fellatio taking place in the sacred precincts of the White House (couldn't possibly ever have happened before!) was worse than a president's maintaining a secret and illegally funded domestic intelligence service for bending election results and punishing his enemies. That's how things are in a village.

Quinn's sublime parochialism and utter lack of self-awareness—Muffie's too!—came across so powerfully in that piece that it's become a symbol of everything that is wrong with our political establishment, its isolation and hypocrisy; its upside-down priorities where David Brooks can quote the evil maxim of Edmund Burke ("Manners are of more importance than laws"*) in perfect seriousness, even as he poses as a moralist himself, and "credibility" and "sending a message" are more serious than the life and death in hunger and violence of masses of human beings; its dread and dislike of gross reality.

Quinn didn't know what she was saying, obviously, but we did, and I'm sure the McGoohan series and the Marie Antoinette story were both part of the cultural context in which we heard and understood it. So, to me, is Agatha Christie's St. Mary Mead, in someplace like Hampshire, where as the well-bred sleuth Miss Marple always says, "One does see so much evil in a village." Indeed one does.

*To be fair to Burke: what he meant is not exactly as shallow as it sounds; translated into 21st-century English, it's more like "culture is of more importance than constitutions", and an arguable point, though I think wrong (because it assumes a monocultural society as a kind of norm, whereas in the real world, increasingly as time goes on, a multiplicity of cultures almost always exists inside a single judicial-political structure, and each culture, including a "majority" one, just has to submit to the pluralism of the whole); but Brooks really does read it in the offensive way, Scalia-fashion, as if the meaning of words were eternally what it is right now and "original intent" is the first thing that comes into your mind when you look at the decontextualized words—"it's more important to be polite than to obey the law."