Cokie's Camp

Cokie's Luxury Fishing Camp in Cocodrie, LA, via homeaway.

The other day, in response to the David Brooks column describing the founding of Israel as 

a historic achievement involving a historic wrong — the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians

I wrote that it was "a place where a little bothsiderism is welcome for a change."

This apparently presented a problem for some readers. I should have written something like the following:

Ex-conservative "centrists" like David Brooks and Matthew Dowd are frequently accused of what blogger Driftglass characterizes as "both siderism" (I close up the two words, others spell it with a hyphen), that is insisting in theory that everyone should always take care to see the good and bad on both sides of a partisan divide, but applying it in practice only to cases in which Republicans look bad (but Hillary is corrupt too! How about those emails?) or Democrats look good (but Ryan has a health care plan as well, tax-free savings accounts!).

This is not a misleading reference—I will never knowingly mislead you—to the hysterical centripetality of writers who always take every difference of opinion to be the endpoints of a spectrum on which they anxiously seek the centerpoint. Nor to Atrios's related concept introduced in 2007-08 of "high Broderism", after the magisterial above-it-all antipartisanship of the late Washington Post opinionist David Broder, which I don't generally use as a technical term (Broder died in 2011, and I kind of don't think anybody remembers who he was, and old jokes don't make good technical terms), and which means something overlapping but different, the belief that partisan differences are really an illusion and we all basically agree on everything if we'd just be sensible about it, as in this case, the earliest example I can find, 24 July 2007:

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.