But, for some reason, "village" made people instead recall that picturesque yet utterly sinister shoreline community known only as The Village, where English actor Patrick McGoohan was held captive for 17 episodes in a 1967 television series called "The Prisoner."

The Hillary crowd ditched their syrupy slogan the instant they recognized the huge danger of having Soccer Moms and other politically naive voters mentally associate her village with his, since the one she’s working so hard to bring about actually is McGoohan’s. The sheeple of this country aren’t supposed to figure that out until after it’s too late.

The plot line of "The Prisoner" is this: McGoohan plays a disgruntled British secret agent who one day turns in his resignation; for his trouble he is abducted to The Village - home to hundreds of other kidnapped ex-spies and intelligence-agency personnel who also tried to leave their jobs and where the mysterious figures in charge want desperately to extract from McGoohan the reason he sought to quit the spy business. The people running The Village all speak with British accents (which suggests they’re on the same team as him), but since McGoohan can’t be sure that they’re not really traitors working for the evil Rooskies, he refuses to sing. His captors are persistent, though - in each episode, they trot out some diabolical new method of breaking McGoohan’s iron will to resist. And, when not being worked over by the honchos, McGoohan busies himself with ingenious escape attempts - a task made especially daunting by the fact that he has no idea where The Village is located (in one scene early in the first episode, for example, McGoohan purchases from a vendor the only map published; it turns out to show nothing more than the you-are-here details of The Village itself and identifies surrounding escarpments and bodies of water as merely The Mountains and The Sea, which, of course, is typical of today’s dumbed-down public-school geography textbooks).

One thing more. The overlords of The Village promise McGoohan that, when they are through subjecting him to their hallucination-inducing drugs and brainwashing electrode implants and treacherous femme fatales, he will find peace and contentment as a complacent, uncritical, loyal, group-think-oriented member of The Village community.

Although "The Prisoner" was made 35 year ago, it’s got a hauntingly contemporary feel to it - and that may be one reason why the series has assumed cult status, especially among thinking conservatives (OK, OK, I know - "thinking conservatives" is redundant, but at least it’s not an oxymoron, like "thinking liberals" is).

I first saw "The Prisoner" as an eighth-grader when it debuted on American television in the summer of 1968. A lot of it went over my head, but the action scenes riveted me. And it wasn’t at all hard for a kid turning 14 to relate to the theme of rugged individual locked in lonely combat with conformist world. Since then, I’ve seen each episode at least a dozen times (most recently about three years ago when they aired on The Mystery Channel). Because I’m older and vastly wiser, I now understand the high-concept stuff that eluded my grasp as a boy.

Which for me makes the "The Prisoner" an extremely disturbing series in light of the way things are in America today. Fans of the show have been warned not to read too much into it - McGoohan himself said there are no deep meanings or prophetic messages hidden in "The Prisoner" (if anyone should know, it’s him: McGoohan was the executive producer and he also wrote and directed a number of the episodes). But as far as I’m concerned, "The Prisoner" has a lot to say to us.

Consider the way each episode opens. With title credits rolling and the theme music soaring, McGoohan storms into the office of his spy boss - a bespectacled, balding old guy - who sits passively as the star shouts and angrily paces before the chief’s desk, hurls down an envelope containing the letter of resignation and, for effect, twice hammers a fist on the desktop, causing a cup of coffee to slosh its mocha-colored contents; McGoohan turns and storms back out, hops in his high-powered racing sports car and heads back to his London flat. You then see him in the apartment where he’s hurriedly packing his bags, among which is an attache case opened long enough for you to glimpse some 8-by-10 color glossies of a tropical beach framed by towering palm trees (or are they cleverly disguised ICBM launchers?). While McGoohan is scurrying about inside, a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman (think Batman’s butler, Alfred) in an old-fashioned mortician’s get-up and carrying a black cane strolls nonchalantly up to the front of the apartment. Next, a cloud of knock-out gas shoots into the dwelling through the keyhole; the room spins and McGoohan collapses. Fade to black, cue commercials; fade back in, show McGoohan reviving in the quarters assigned to him in The Village.

If you were to see this for this first time today, not knowing the series was shot 35 years ago, you would be forgiven for not realizing that McGoohan is supposed to be a secret agent. To you, when he storms that office, that guy sitting behind the desk could very easily be the principal of an elementary school and McGoohan the outraged father of a kindergartner who the day before was forced to sit through a gay-lesbian-transgender puppet show in which the main characters were a condom, a double-ended dildo and a super-value-sized bottle of estrogen pills. As you perceive it, that envelope thrown onto the desk contains not a spy’s resignation notice but the father’s notice of intent to, effective immediately, homeschool the child. The knock-out gas that follows (and subsequent imprisonment in The Village) is exactly what the teachers’ unions prescribe for parents who dare withdraw their kids from the clutches of the public school system, you surmise.

Or, perhaps, you think, the guy behind the desk is a tree-hugging, Gaia-worshipping county planning commissioner, and McGoohan is a citizen who owns some beach property on which he wants to build himself a modest home. The bureaucrat has been refusing to let McGoohan erect even so much as a Moondoggie-type straw hut there, and so McGoohan has dug up damaging evidence showing that the commissioner intends to use eminent-domain powers to confiscate the property and then turn it over to an environmentalist group (on whose board of directors the planning commissioner’s wife and brother-in-law hold seats) so that the enviros can resell the parcel at a huge profit to a developer who will turn it into a shopping mall. Again, knock-out gas and Village confinement are just the kind of reaction you’re beginning to expect from Greenies when you oppose them on such matters.

Or, possibly McGoohan to you appears to be a lover of sports cars who is livid that the desk-jockey in front of him (no doubt a hog-stupid Department of Motor Vehicles customer "service" clerk) won’t give McGoohan a waiver to spare him the time and expense of equipping his hand-built, totally exotic ride with an unworkable emissions-control system that, even if it could be made to work, would reduce the car’s horsepower from 400 to 10 (or, roughly the same output of your average go-kart engine). And, once more, when you observe the knock-out gas filling McGoohan’s home and the trip to The Village it presages, you think, yep, that’s how the government responds nowadays to even the tamest of troublemakers.

Personally, if you ask me, what McGoohan is supposed to be is an oppressed taxpayer and the old man at the desk is an Internal Revenue Service official. Inside the envelope that McGoohan whomps down is his last year’s tax return, shredded, with a cover note that tells the IRS to go to hell and says he’s finished having his hard-earned money stolen by the government for redistribution to the pockets of lazy, shiftless members of the Democrats’ loyal voting blocs. This makes the most sense to me because, once McGoohan arrives in The Village, there’s an exchange that goes like this:

McGoohan: "Where am I?"

Man’s voice: "In the Village."

McGoohan: "What do you want?"

Voice: "Tax-return information."

McGoohan: "Whose side are you on?"

Voice: "That would be telling . . .We want information, information, tax-return information."

McGoohan: "You won't get it."

Voice: "By hook or by crook, we will."

Spoken like a true IRS official. But this conversation gets creepier. McGoohan next asks the disembodied voice to name himself. The reply: "[I am] the new Number 2." OK, McGoohan is thinking, I’ll play along here: "Who is Number 1?" he shoots back. No answer, just an admonition to McGoohan: "You are Number 6." Actually McGoohan’s number is longer than that - it’s a total of 10 digits beginning with the number 6, and it was taken from his Social Security card (they call him 6 for short, to keep things on that phonily chummy, first-name basis that so many representatives of government and business put themselves on with you when they want to disarm you or simply condescend to you).

The other aspect of "The Prisoner" that’s right up to date is the continual surveillance of the inhabitants of The Village. McGoohan can’t go anywhere (not even to the crapper) or do anything without being monitored by cameras, microphones and sensors (which is why his escape attempts always fail). Every word he utters, every sideways glance he takes is recorded and exhaustively analyzed in The Village’s underground command center, the place where No. 2 hangs out. Tell me this kind of thing isn’t going on right now in major cities across the nation, as well as in the public schools (via assessment testing). And, ever hear of the Eschelon and Carnivore systems that intercept on a mass-scale our phone conversations and e-mails?

If you can, do yourself a favor and rent or buy "The Prisoner" series (it’s available in both VHS and DVD formats; visit Amazon.com if you can’t find it in your favorite local video store). Granted, some elements of the show are absurd (such as the official sport of The Village, a weird combination of trampolining, karate and jousting) while others are beyond comprehension (particularly the wildly improbable conclusion, the script of which is said to have been thrown together at the last minute and was so riddled with dialogue gaps that the actors had to ad-lib their way through many parts of it).

But setting aside those annoyances, "The Prisoner" will show you exactly what the political Left in this country has in mind for us: a total-surveillance society peopled by men and women who offer no resistance when government demands the surrender of their freedoms and their right to live out their days as autonomous individuals, responsible for their own prosperity, happiness and well-being. You may be depressed by it, you might even be frightened. I’m hoping it will inspire you to resist. Because that’s what we need to do in the face of the Left’s accelerating onslaught of godless, unconstitutional, immoral demands for our obedience - resist.

Thank you, Patrick McGoohan, for warning us when you did.


"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."

Rich Smith has been a freelance journalist since 1976 and is currently based in a nearly liberal-free zone along the rim of California's fearsome Mojave Desert. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.

Rich Smith can be reached at newsdesk@cci-yuccavalley.com

Published in the August 9, 2002 issue of  Ether Zone.
Copyright © 1997 - 2002 Ether Zone.

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