Don't Apologize to Me, Bro'!

One of my favorite television series of all time was the two-season British sci-fi/spy import The Prisoner, first shown in the late 1960s. In it, an unnamed former British agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) is kidnapped and transported to an isolated village aptly named "The Village". It is an open prison camp for political and espionage prisoners, with the objective of using various means (torture, hypnosis, drugs, trickery, etc.) to elicit desired information from the guests. The inmates are stripped of their real names and only referred to by number. McGoohan’s character is Number Six, and he spends the entire series alternating between trying to escape from the Village and disrupting the general aims of his captors. One late episode in the series, titled A Change of Mind, features a new plan by the Village to get its citizens to become more conforming and compliant. If a particular prisoner begins to show behavior of an independent nature, the “rulers” start a process whereby key "citizens" of the Village begin to accuse him of being “unmutual”. Then the process of social shunning sets in, involving the entire community ostracizing the “wayward” inmate. Finally, the prisoner in question is given the opportunity to publicly confess his delinquency. At the beginning of the episode, one such confession is shown, where a young, bearded male prisoner nervously walks up to the microphone in front of an audience and begins to hysterically rant about how “unmutual” he was and how he has now changed. The fervor of his speech climbs to the point where he closes it by screaming “believe me!” several times. Afterward, he steps down and is once again accepted as a member of this perverse “community”.

In a similar vein, we have today, in the “real” world, an example of a defiant individual being publicly ostracized and compelled to recant to the community for his “antisocial” behavior. Andrew Meyer’s only transgression is that he overstepped the rules for questioning at a public forum and then didn’t go into the mandated “play dead” stance when the local police began to rough-handle him, completely out of proportion to what the situation called for. Now Meyer has written letters of apology to several different parties concerned in the incident, directly or indirectly, as well as post an apology on the Internet. But are these apologies really free, or is it like the fictional prisoner, who, being accused of being “unmutual”, bellowed out his humiliating apology with “believe me!” Incidentally, Number Six (who should have been Meyer’s role model in this case) never recanted after himself being accused of being unmutual, and eventually turned the tables on his accusers. The whole Andrew Meyer incident, down to these apologies, sends a chill through my spine. Are we unwittingly becoming a prison-village, too?

Apparently, the local Gainesville authorities have decided that Andrew Meyer’s apologies may be good enough for them to at least drop the felony charge being considered against him. But they, according to MSNBC, have a card up their sleeve: if Meyer changes or denies his apologies within the next 18 months, they can still go back and prosecute him for that felony! So this American citizen’s mouth is essentially being zipped up on him by the State! My analogy between Meyer’s situation and the totalitarian “Village” portrayed in an old science fiction TV show isn’t so far-fetched after all.