When I first started avidly reading political blogs, so many years ago (okay, like five), I was struck by how they created a language all unto themselves. Some words I really loved. The verb 'to fisk', for example. Or, even the noun 'blogosphere.'
But on a list of important blogosphere contributions would have to be "The Village." I'll let Greg Sargent take this:
“The Village” and “The Villagers” are terms frequently used in the liberal blogosphere as a derisive epithet for the Beltway media and political elite. The term “Village” appears to be a reference to a famous 1998 article written for The Washington Post by D.C. society hostess and WaPo writer Sally Quinn, in which she explained the Beltway establishment’s outrage over Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Quinn wrote, without irony, that Establishment Washington — which she described as “the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it” — is “not unlike any other small community in the country.”
“They call the capital city their `town,’” Quinn wrote. Thanks to the Lewinsky mess, she added, “their town has been turned upside down.”
Digby, who coined the term, has this to say:
Greg is right that it stems from the notorious Sally Quinn article about the Clintons. But it's more than that. It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.
It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or their drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about what they all do, creating social rules for others which they ignore themselves.
The village is really "the village" an ersatz small town like something you'd see in Disneyland. And to those who argue that Versailles is the far better metaphor, I would just say that it is Versailles --- a very particular part:A Picturesque Little Village
Part of the grounds near the Trianon were chosen by Marie-Antoinette as the site of a lakeside village, a crucial feature of picturesque landscape gardens then so fashionable among Europe's aristocracy. In 1783, Richard Mique built this amusement village where the queen played at being a shepherdess.
In 1784, Marie-Antoinette had a farm built, where she installed a farming couple from the Touraine region, along with their two children. They were charged with supplying the queen with eggs, butter, cream and cheese, for which they disposed of cows, goats, farmyard animals.
Perhaps the strangest thing about "The Village" is its bizarre insularity--not just from outside facts and criticisms (i.e. shouting The Public Option is Dead and Only Liberals Like the Public Option even though polls consistently give well over 50 percent support for it...), but from self-analysis. They are, if not patient zero, certainly a victim of what Harper's calls Self-Satirizing Syndrome.
If you ask me, this is why The Daily Show is so popular. Stewart doesn't even have to say anything. He can can just juxtapose clips of the Villagers vituperating from week to week, and, presto, the hypocrisy, the shallowness, the mind-blowing dissonance is self-evident.
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