Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The Prisoner, in the form of AMC’s new series, ends with epispde six, Checkmate. Much of what one might have suspected is confirmed: The Village is a place in one’s mind, we learn that Number 6 has the chance to run The Village, and he takes that opportunity, replacing the community administrator, Number 2.

(Number 2, by the way, lives in Palais Two, while many other residents of this imaginary place live in much smaller A-frame cottages; the imaginary Village is no egalitarian dream.)

Number 6, at the end of the episode having chosen to run The Village, commits himself to making it a better place.

And here is how the new version of The Prisoner differs from the old: the old community was a real place, and Number 6 had no interest in running it. In this way, I think the old series was actually brighter, and the new one a darker vision.
Now I know that the community in the new miniseries is meant to be a therapeutic place, but therapy so coerced and controlled is the definition of a dystopia. It’s hardly a place one would wish to live.

Ask yourself: if you could run a community, and shape the lives of all its residents with only your judgment of their betterment, would you do so?

The answer tells much about a person. To answer yes is to assume a God-like judgment. One often thinks about what one might do, what powers one might have, without considering how these powers would vastly exceed one’s judgment, even if one should magically acquire them.

And yet, it’s certainly intoxicating, for some, the thought of shaping a political community, of directing it in a particular way, through one’s vision.

The insistence that a political community requires a political leader who will bend and twist and cajole and exhort is mere pride.

Hayek was right, about order: apart from minimal rules of law and organization, one should strive for a spontaneous order. The free and voluntary transactions and associations among common people will produce a better community than any politician’s proud vision, any bureaucrat’s smug assertion of tenure and authority.

I’ve had fun blogging about The Prisoner. That imaginary world may be dark, but our own experiences offer lots of light moments. It could only be a free and optimistic society – just like America – that would develop and protect blogging, about any number of ideas, stories, and topics.

A blogger can sit at a computer, at a time of his choosing, and write on any topic he wants, as often as he wants. There’s freedom and optimism in that – The Prisoner one day, or for several, and something different thereafter.

One of the many reasons – from among others far more precious – to be grateful in America this Thanksgiving.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

In this episode, the Prisoner meets a version of himself, a version of The Village Administrator, and learns that The Village is a a created place. By the end of the episode, he has enough information to how The Village is artificial in a particular way. Some in The Village, it turns out, just can’t leave, for reasons beyond physical compulsion.

That’s one of the ways that The Village in this miniseries departs from the one in the original British series from the 1960s.

The original occupied a place alongside Thirty Six Hours, for example, as a place that wasn’t what it seemed. In that film, James Garner finds that the place he’s recovering isn’t the hospital, in the time, it seems to be.

A film like Dark City has a similar theme: is the 1940s era city in which everyone lives, and where it’s always dark, really a 1940s American city?

But this new miniseries of The Prisoner imagines a town like something out of The Matrix.

There are times in any real town, like Whitewater, Wisconsin when experiences seem out of joint, contrary to what one might expect.

That’s true of us, here, when we place the superficial and ephemeral ahead of the fundamental and enduring. Not all ways of living are the same; the long and principled American political, legal, and economic tradition will always trump public relations and an incumbent’s self-interest.

When we seem artificial, I think that’s why – the recognition that there’s a contradiction been superficial conditions and the fundamental principles of the culture in which we live.

We have in this town only limited participation in local elections, but a greater turnout for state and federal races. There’s a puzzle in this, that cannot be answered by saying that some temporary residents have a greater interest in state or federal affairs.

The opposite should be true – rationally, voters should see that they have a greater chance to influence events when the total electorate is smaller.

Yet, despite all the talk about local exceptionalism, it is state and federal races that attract greater participation. Even where a voter’s impact may seem less, those races draw greater participation.

I’ve contended consistently, from the first publication of this website, that our politics in this small town are distorted, as is a culture – the product of only several hundred – that insists on cheerleading rather than describing honestly.

It is this situation that seems artificial, a distortion, I think, from what so many more hope and admire about small town America.

It’s a temporary distortion, though; this present distortion will fade away, as Whitewater reconciles herself to trends and principles of America beyond. Those principles will, in their way, restore and reinforce the benefits of our small town experience.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The fourth episode of the remake involves the effort of The Village’s administrator to sign Number 6 up with a dating service. The theory, one supposes, is that it will help to learn more about 6.

Fortunately, I know of no analogous program in Wisconsin; I have never heard of a city official in our state trying to arrange a dating service appointment for a resident. (There was once a report of a police sergeant from Pewaukee, Wisconsin directing someone to look up the phone number in a police database of a suspect she found attractive, but the sergeant was demoted. She has since appealed the demotion; sometimes desire doesn’t know when to stop, and walk away quietly.)

There’s enough information by now – about two-thirds through the miniseries – to question whether The Village is a real and physical place. It may be real, it seems, only in the way that thoughts are considered real. One might not doubt that a person thinks certain things, but instead question whether those thoughts correspond with the world beyond one’s head.

The residents of The Village have reason to wonder, too: unexpected sinkholes keep popping up throughout the town, large enough to swallow a person.

What to make of the holes? Well, The Village puts out a message over town loudspeakers that the sinkholes are ‘weather anomalies’ and that the best defense is a pig in every home. (Apparently pig breath is believed to improve the atmosphere, and prevent anomalies like sinkholes.)

Now, it’s a ridiculous plan, and one might suppose that I would criticize Whitewater’s politicians and bureaucrats for coming up with similar and absurd proposals.

I won’t, as they haven’t. Our small town’s leaders do not begin with absurd proposals, but with rational ones that are often ill-fitting or contradictory to policy elsewhere, beyond the city.

No one begins with the absurd; we’ve no alchemy here. Those living elsewhere would not find people – or at least no more than elsewhere – casting spells or administering leeches.

In most respects, we’re easily as modern as other places, watching the same programs, music, and films as others do though satellite television, Netflix, and the Internet. There’s nothing different about many of the products we buy.

A rural community is different in experiences and culture, but not for isolation from America.

We’re hardly primitive rustics. On the contrary, if anything, we are too quick to adopt and embrace the same management theories and practices used elsewhere, believing in them even when misapplied. Even believing in them longer than we should, and more deeply than will ever be justified.

Along the way, clear and profound principles are sometimes lost, swept aside for convenience, or distorted. Those principles are not ones of management, but of rights and liberties, of opportunities and prosperity.

Here’s commentary on the third episode of AMC’s The Prisoner.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

A man called Number 6, rather than a name, finds himself in a community called The Village, wondering where he is, how he got there, and trying to return to a place called New York.

Most of the residents would tell Number 6 that there is no New York, and that he’s simply mad to imagine that there is, and that he once lived there.

In the third episode, Anvil, the community administrator, Number 2, gives Number 6 a chance to become a spy for The Village surveillance, and to observe those dissenters the authorities consider dreamers – the madness of believing in something beyond The Village, or questioning ideas about the community.

Number 6 sees that the administrator cannot be trusted, but he agrees to be part of a two-man surveillance unit, in the hope that he might learn more about the origins and truth of the place.

There are some striking scenes in the episode, especially how children are taught, from their early school years, to observe and record their parents’ behavior, and to identify any anomalies in their parents’ routines.

As one could guess, the children lack an adult’s discernment, so even commonplace changes in routine – such as a skipped exercise class – suggest something sinister in an adult’s behavior.

The sensible conclusion, of course, is that small changes are only small; there’s no grand conclusion to be drawn. The children don’t see it that way, and they are encouraged to see minor changes as suggestive of big events and motivations.

How does that suspicion come about? The Village’s society must encourage and reinforce the notion that questions, contrary opinions, and novel ideas are both wrong and mad.

The natural, rational faculty of a person drifts into both suspicion of motivation and discomfort with contrary opinions only through tutelage.

So how does this happen? In The Village it happens because children are indoctrinated. In a small community, in rural America, I think it happens when adults set aside American individualism for a sense of order, control, comfort, and familiarity.

The description of these impulses, when they become overbearing, is telling. One will not hear someone declare, ‘this is what America expects, or requires.’ Instead, the need for order is expressed in local, seemingly practical ways, but almost always terms without reliance on the principles of this state or country.

The local convenience or need that regulators assert often has no foundation in American principle; an authority in a vulgar and unprincipled place abroad could assert something similar.

(When those who attempt to regulate locally do so with reliance on a supposed American standard, they typically misconstrue that standard. Usually, they don’t even make the effort.)

It’s not that they favor government intrusion; it’s that they favor governmemt’s support of their views as a defense of the community itself.

The community began, flourished, and would go on well with far less government, regulation, or planning, and the insistence that these three are indispensable to life. Of all the conversations, meetings, and moments between people in our town, only the smallest number depend on government.

Every encroachment from meddling bureaucrats further undermines positive and voluntary private activity.

Civil society is fundamentally a private, unregulated, uncontrolled set of associations. The number of things people do apart from government puts lie to the notion that government is necessary for community prosperity.

Yet, wherever he goes, Number 6 finds others who share his convictions, and the presence of so many hidden dreamers is reassuring to him. He’s resolute in his individualism, and comes to see that even with The Village, others share his view.

Here’s a review of episode two of AMC’s Prisoner. Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

There are differences from the original series and this remake, the first involving the administrator of The Village, Number 2. In the original series, there was a different Number 2 in each episode; in this version, Number 2 (played by Ian McKellan) is the same man in every episode (at least, I assume he stays the same).

I think, too, that The Village seems considerably bigger than in the original program. It must be fairly large, the size of a small city – thousands – rather than hundreds.

A clue to the size of the community comes when a family watches a televised soap opera, and refers to all the characters by their numbers, e.g., 2343, or large numbers of that kind.

(No one in The Village has anything other than a number for a name.)

Numbers for names may be recycled, of course, but other details – like the presence of an exclusive resort, or a tour bus line – suggest a large place.

We learn two new things about the community in this episode: Number 6 is supposed to have a brother, and he is recommended for psychiatric care (called the talking cure) because he persists in his conviction that he’s not just a number, The Village’s supposed harmony is a fraud, and there’s a wider world beyond.

I’ll not mention too much about the supposed brother, Number 16. There is, though, a telling scene where Number 2 draws the winner of a contest to a resort within The Village, and it just happens, just by chance, surely, that the winner is Number 6’s purported brother.

No one seems shocked, at least to let on, that the winner is the relative of the one person the community’s administrator is trying to pacify.

A small town tends toward this risk: that with a small range of people involved in projects, committees, etc., people will tend to favor those they know, rather than treating all – from a much larger and unfamiliar number – equally. In a community where familiarity matters, bias remains a constant risk.

After a while, as in The Village, it’s not even recognizable as bias.

There’s another telling segment, where administrator Number 2 recommends Number 6 for the talking cure – psychotherapy – because Number 6 persists in the conviction that there’s a world beyond The Village. To think so, and to question policy, seems like madness.

It’s not long before we learn that the administrator doesn’t believe in the talking cure, but merely sees it as a way to pressure and dupe Number 6.

It’s simultaneously funny and disturbing: dissent is treated as madness, but those who so contend know that’s not true. It’s just one more arrow in a quiver of blame shifting.

If you’re reading from California, you know very well that editorials, radio programs, magazines, and television programs cover every inch of your city’s politics. What passes for acerbic here would be mild where you are. It’s not that you’re naturally different for us; it’s that you’re socially different.

Our early time as a people, through the nineteenth century, saw robust commentary that still flourishes in many parts of America. For reasons partly inscrutable, the same robust commentary did not survive here.

On the contrary, it came to be depicted as an anti-community impulse. The irony of a nation and town founded on individualism insisting on quiet or agreement as a community requirement is lost on some in Whitewater, Wisconsin and other small towns.

It’s no irony at all in The Village, as residents there are denied knowledge of an outside world. We have no similar constraint. We have, instead, a certain and powerful tradition of individual liberty as part of a vast republic, free and exceptional, all around us, now and for centuries past.

The first two episodes of the new AMC series The Prisoner were televised last night. I expected only one; two episodes were a surprise treat. I will post a review of the first episode today, and the second tomorrow (a change of plan, as I didn’t know that there would be two episodes last night).

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The Prisoner is the story of a man who finds himself in a small, mysterious community called The Village (the definite article is always capitalized). He doesn’t know how he got there, where it is, or who runs it.

As for his own life, only fragmentary memories remain of time spent somewhere else, and he finds that instead of a name, he is now only a number: Number 6. An older man, named Number 2, seems to run The Village, or at least is the most visible authority in the community. The Village has no apparent nationality, so one doesn’t know Number 2’s connection to any country or agency.

There are aspects of the story that are oddly funny, and applicable to life in an eccentric rural town. When Number 6 is surprised that a shopkeeper he’s never met greets him by his new, numerical name, the shopkeeper reassures that there’s nothing odd, as “everybody knows everybody.”

There’s some of that familiarity in small town life, but even more, sometimes the expectation of it. Not knowing someone can be jarring to longtime residents, in a way it would never be to someone in a far larger place, without the presumption of familiarity.

In the episode, Number 6 finds that The Village, though small, is a uniform and planned community. Many of the houses look the same, and he finds one marked 6, intended just for him. (He’s simply expected to move in; no deed required.)

I’m sure that when people think about the small-town Midwest, from places far away, they think about a simple and unplanned life. In urban communities of stifling regulation, a town like Whitewater, Wisconsin must seem like an oasis of simplicity.

We were surely less regulated once, but we’re far more so now. Though we have thousands instead of hundreds of thousands, we’ve still fallen prey and under the sway of community planning.

Only recently, our city’s planning commission – we have one – reviewed a comprehensive plan for the town. The plan is proposed to guide community development for the next twenty years.

What will be useful of it, or from it, by then no one can say. It’s available online, at Comprehensive Plan.

There’s another aspect of life in The Village that Number 6 encounters not long after arrival – the unwillingness of most fellow residents to admit that there might be something outside the town.

Two people Number 6 meets, Numbers 93 and 313, have drawn pictures of things they hazily recall seeing before arriving at The Village. (I won’t say what they draw, except to note that both pictures are landmarks from two great cities.)

Number 6 also finds that those who recall something beyond The Village don’t seem to fare well; they have a reduced life prospects. The Village isn’t a place that favors too many questions, where even one is the beginning of too many.

Is there anything good about The Village? Well, it’s sunny, and everyone seems well dressed.

I doubt, though, that clothes truly make the man.

Some months ago, at the suggestion of a particularly sharp reader, I created a weekly feature called Prisoner Monday, in which I posted video excerpts from the British television series The Prisoner.

The series describes the adventures of a man who finds himself in a mysterious place called The Village, and his quest to find out who he is, what The Village is, who runs it, and to return to London.

The AMC cable channel now has a new version of the series, beginning this Sunday at 7 PM central time.

So, is Whitewater, Wisconsin like the Village? Well, the taglines of the new series – there seem to be two different ones – are “You Only Think You’re Free” and “No Man is a Number.” On the AMC website, clicking on a map of The Village activates a voiceover that says, “Welcome to The Village: Everybody Knows Everybody!”

I believe in free will, even in conditions of stodgy town fathers and petty planners, so I’d probably disagree with the first tagline. If it were true that there were no free will, then I’d probably not be able to publish an account of life in Whitewater as candid as the one I write.

The second tagline is true – no man is (merely) a number.

The third – about everybody knowing everybody – is just funny. It often seems that everybody knows everybody else, sometimes to comical effect.

That brings to mind a truth about cheerleading here – it’s completely humorless, bland, oh-so-earnest, and so terribly serious.

It’s normal to tease about a place, any place, as well as criticize or praise. It’s only in a place that has gone dry and become humorless that even normal commentary seems an affront to life itself.

And that, candidly, is the kind of life one would only expect in The Village, and not an American small town.

Update, 1:32 PM: I carelessly forgot to mention that I will offer commentary on each episode of the new series, with reference to Whitewater’s political and social scene. I’ll post on each episode the day after it’s first televised.

Somewhere, there must be books that describe how one should properly and appropriately set table, with the correct and approved position of plates, glasses, knives, forks, and spoons.

I have never read any of those books, nor felt that I should. When I go to a restaurant, I assume that the owner has figured all that out, and I’m not going to spend time wondering, in any event. At home, at table, I am interested only with the conversation, and not the place setting. The arrangement of glasses and plates adds nothing to me, or to anyone else with me.

A man is more than things, and more than their fussy arrangement.

But you know, and I know, that these things matter to some people. There’s a sense of meaning, and worse, a sense of hierarchy, for some in the knowledge of these rules.

One of the great advantages of American and Wisconsin life – now disappearing – is how causal we are. We are not a fussy people. One often assumes that residents of small towns follow this simpler life.

In many ways we do; in others we have become overly concerned about what’s polite, appropriate, and proper. We are reputed as simple and straightforward, but we have become mannered, complicated, obscure, and fussy.

There’s a good deal that’s self-serving in this change, a way to impose a barrier or objection to someone at a meeting, or to disqualify objections to policy.

There’s no natural reason in any of this; it’s an artificial objection from those looking for a easy, if empty, way out.

Consider the urban chicken movement, one that your city, if far from rural America, may have adopted. Urban residents are permitted to own a chicken or two, for fresh eggs, and perhaps as part of an effort at greener living.

I am not sure how convenient it would be, or how green. No matter: in many rural towns, it would be both illegal and objectionable.

Whitewater has an ordinance against livestock on land of less than two acres, and although the ordinance does not mention chickens, it is written broadly, to implicate species not expressly mentioned.

(This presumably allows the city to rule against someone who might splice together a pig and a cow, calling it a pow, and putting it in his backyard. Many of our ordinances are written broadly, in a way that permits the city to rule restrictively and expansively. Some, although not this one particularly, are likely unenforceable at law as overbroad, vague, or contradictory to state law.)

But let’s be clear: urban chickens would be unwelcome here for social reasons – because they remind some of rural origins they would otherwise like to forget, now imagining themselves more sophisticated than mere farm life.

That brings me to the AMC television program Mad Men, and one of its characters. One of the leading characters in the third season is an English executive who leaves London to oversee an ad agency in 1963 Manhattan.

He finds New York a refreshing and liberating change after the stuffy and restrictive manners of early 60s London. He tells his wife, happily, that even after months working in Manhattan, no one has bothered to ask where he went to school. The English executive learns that the go-getter Americans just don’t care as much as his native countrymen would.

The American way, I am sure, was and is better; it just shouldn’t matter so much.

We have adopted empty manners, and servilely expected deference to them, in contradiction to the more direct and casual small town way of life.

I have written a few overview posts, these past two weeks, highlighting unusual and curious aspects of life here. I will resume a more conventional posting schedule, with a daily morning feature, beginning next week.

In the meantime, I will finish highlighting some of the ways that we’re just not the rural town that the rest of America, and even we, might expect to find in a place of our size and location.

First, we are more regulated and restrictive than a place founded on individual, private initiative would be expected to be.

Second, we have in our community a small group that despises the two great advantages – students and immigrants – that set us apart from other rural communities. What is a blessing to us, some receive only as a curse.

Third, we often emphasize management, projects, plans, and proposals over the fundamentals of governance. Where equitable administration of the law from open and honest government should be, we find schemes billed as the next big transformation, etc., of our small town.

We would do better to govern well than plan well (should planning ever go well), to be good rather than insisting that we look good.

That brings me to the fourth oddity of our town, that there’s an inexplicable desire to insist that there are no problems here, and that saying, even hinting, that there might be is a betrayal of Whitewater, Wisconsin.

Those who have read this website regularly know that I think the opposite is true: Whitewater is made better when she embraces the true honest and accountability of the American political and legal traditions. Whitewater is worthy not merely as a small town, but as a small American town.

A local exceptionalism that departs from genuine American exceptionalism condemns the town to relative decline, greater poverty, and a gradual withering.

I cannot account for this stubborn, ignorant, and destructive desire to insist that all is well. I have no easy explanation. I see only that it is the opposite of the candor and honesty so many hope a small town to display.

There’s a close cousin to this cheerleading, this boosterism: an inexplicable veneration of every politician, bureaucrat, and bureaucrat’s program as wonderful and astonishing.

Consider these remarks, appearing on the website of a local politician and online publisher, about our City Manager, Kevin Brunner:

The Whitewater Kiwanis Breakfast Club was fortunate to have City Manager, Kevin Brunner, present to explain the attempts recently to be more sensitive to the environment as a municipal government and to create greater sustainability in the world around us.

Kevin covered the many projects already undertaken or the planning being made for the future, including the applying for grants to assist in the heavy up-front financial commitment necessary to begin a project with the pay-off coming in a few years due to the savings possible. He was very keen on the treatment of the downtown lakes to make them a lasting resource for the community. Much city effort is devoted to managing the storm water runoff into the local watershed.

I am sure our local Kiwanis chapter was glad to have a guest speaker; I am not sure the attendance of our city manager, a career bureaucrat working in a small town, is a matter of good fortune.

(Note: My remarks are not specific to Kiwanis, or any other civic organization; it’s the overdone characterization of an official’s presence and role that interests me.)

Wouldn’t one expect him to show up? One of the supposed benefits of small town life is that people are humble and unpretentious. I don’t mean merely that they pretend to be, but that they really are.

We’d be fortunate if a great scientist came to town, or an eminent theologian preached at a local church. Those would be rare and unexpected events, out of the ordinary.

It’s odd enough that the presence of the town’s manager seems a matter of fortune, but the emphasis on the municipal government’s role in assuring sustainability is overdone.

The idea of an indispensable city government – fixing all sorts of problems, saving us as we supposedly need saving at its hands – is just the self-absorption and narcissism of a few politicians and bureaucrats.

Our town was not built on this self-absorption, and the notion that local government is indispensable.

We’ve no reason to be star struck by the ordinary. Its foolish and embarrassing to describe events of the town as with a tone suitable only to Tiger Beat.

How this view and tone began I cannot say, but it has infected so much of local talk and our local press that we have lost our way from a clearer and simpler, unpretentious standard.