Village Courtiers
by Mark Adams, KOS-posted
Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero (who really has one of the coolest obscure handles on the interwebs) and Digby have been trying to get a handle on what to do about The Villagers, those out-of-touch, self-important, insulated members of the Washington D.C. elite. Stoller has picked up the meme and Glenn Greenwald connects it to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, Wealth of Nations, warning us of the dangerous behavior of our Washington establishment's orthodoxy, the immunity the "Beltway Village" enjoys from the consequences of their imperial intrigues.
Useful as this cute metaphor can be to illustrate the sequestered sense of parochialism and disconnect that informs the pampered malignancy infesting the ruling class mentality of the Capital's group-think, it doesn't quite capture the essence of what we are witnessing today -- the Imperial Reality.
When Jay Rosen spoke of the "Palace Press," it clicked for me. Rosen remembers well the phrase, ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." It's the same thing that bothers Chris Matthews about Hillary's campaign strong-arming G.Q. Magazine over an uncomplimentary article with threats to restrict their access to Bill. The palace at the center of Disneyland on the Potomac is built entirely on the sycophantic dance of power -- those with it and those who want it.
Information and access is their currency. Hillary's team playing this out in public threatened to expose the charade. It's not what she did, but that she didn't care to be discreet is what violated the rules of Higher Broderism.
Naturally, in this "Information Age," the truism that "Information is Power" plays out with even more vengeance than when feminist Robin Morgan coined the phrase. What we usually miss is the ritual involved in accumulating such power, through secrecy, that her entire quote warns about:
"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility."Taking their cue from this most secretive of administrations which has dispensed with the outmoded notion of humility by going directly to the tyrant stage, the "Courtiers," the Beltway punditry and D.C. journalists in consort with bureaucrats, officials and advisers play the game of "who can tell what to whom." Were it not for the Valerie Plame affiar, Judith Miller would still be the belle of this ball.
If the dance should remind you of anything, try thinking Louis XIV's royal court at Versailles consolidating all power in the Royal Person himself, an absolute monarchy that controlled all rituals of power and association of the government's functionaries and the aristocracy with one goal: perpetuation of their privileged position. It's the Peter Principle writ large, or more precisely, fear of Negative Selection that keeps the dancers moving to the tune.
Hardly the same mental picture you get when thinking of a quaint little village.
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Execellent, Mark. Yes, I've always thought that the Versailles metaphor was quite apt. I think that "The Village" one has more to do with the way they see themselves. Another amazing disconnect, eh?
Do you suppose that the only possible end game here is that they will all keep loosing market share until they're talking only to each other?
Posted by: shep![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.rubyan.com/politics/nav-commenters.gif)
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October 5, 2007 11:48 AM
It depends on whether a wall starts being formed between the big bloggers like KOS, HuffPost, the MyDD/OpenLeft crowd as more or less "Main Stream BLOGGERS" and the rest of us.
As higher profile folks like Anna Marie Cox and Glenn Greenwald get sucked into more profit driven outlets, there's the chance that the higher trafficed sites will be co-opted by consultant fees and ad revenue.
For instance, there's speculation (that I don't really buy, but I've see it) that one of the reasons MarKOS came down so hard on Edwards for the public funding decision is because the site was seen as such a pro-Edwards community his entrepreneurial spirit wanted to generate conflict -- and thus more traffic.
If so, the Village will only grow. I think it's much more likely that we are only seeing the beginning of the push-back from the old versus the new media, and there are enough delightfully talented antiestablishmentarianists out there (awesome that I found a way to use that in a sentence) that the "Village" will indeed lose it's relevance -- but never entirely -- since they will always have the paid staff to do the leg work real reporting demands.
There's no glory in parking yourself in the municipal court house and it's too boring unless you're paid. Not something a blogger would do voluntarily -- but it's the only place where a Woodward or Bernstein smells something fishy about the well dressed lawyers representing some third-rate burglars.
By the way, Me Mate, I agree. Jon Stewart was cool last night, and outstanding all week.
Posted by: Mark Adams![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.rubyan.com/politics/nav-commenters.gif)
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October 5, 2007 01:56 PM
Interesting. Personally, I don’t see any of the big liberal bloggers, Hamsher, Greenwald, Cox, Kos, etc., getting bought out (maybe my naïveté is still intact after all ;^) If anything, they seem to be getting more “radical” in response to the MSM’s increasingly apparent disconnect from reality. Regardless, I figure people like you and me will find those voices whoever they are, eh buddy?
Either way, it’s why an open internet scares the bejesus out of The Entitled, which we should worry about.
I’m no kossack and I’ve got no dog in the ’08 fight (any Democratic dog will do) but I take Markos’ support as pretty principled. He’s a Dodd man, after all, and there’s nothing pragmatic in that. A shame since Dodd is usually out in front with the most principled stands on the most important issues of the day (but that’s from the liberal perspective so no wonder he hasn’t any chance against the relentlessly vapid Village).
Posted by: shep![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.rubyan.com/politics/nav-commenters.gif)
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October 5, 2007 08:28 PM