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"  Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, lay on his back in the sun and contemplated the deep blue of the cold, late autumn sky. Ever since Master had gone on something called &amp;quot;book leave,&amp;quot; Moral Hazard had been sprung from the Young Fogies Club on 57th Street and had been farmed out to a rural town upstate. There, Moral Hazard had run with the horses, chased the crows, whiled away long afternoons licking his balls in deep contemplation, greeted Hank, the Mailman, every afternoon, and generally spent all his time getting back in touch with his essential doghood. Idly rolling over again, he saw Hank coming up the long driveway with that day&amp;#039;s newspaper in his hands. Moral Hazard ran to meet him and Hank scratched him behind his ears. (This was something new and pleasant to Moral Hazard. He was unfamiliar with physical demonstrations of human affection, save for those times when Douthat, the houseboy, would sprinkle him with Holy Water, which made him sneeze.) Hank put the paper in his mouth and Moral Hazard loped back up on the porch, dropping it in front of the door. The afternoon breeze stirred the pages, and Moral Hazard noticed that, from wherever &amp;quot;book leave&amp;quot; was, Master had bestirred himself to write a column. Moral Hazard sighed a deep sigh and licked his balls again. He knew this couldn&amp;#039;t last. This would all be over soon. He looked out over the broad expanse of the front lawn. There were five crows wandering around there. Moral Hazard leaped after them. He would miss the crows, he thought. And Hank. In an act of amazing public service, I have not written a column in three months.  Self-deprecation. It&amp;#039;s not just for humor any more. In the course of that time, I&amp;#039;ve stepped back from politics, a bit, and thought about other things. That naturally raises the question: How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain? Depends, I guess, on how vast are your brain&amp;#039;s spaces for entertaining. Let&amp;#039;s use one of President Obama&amp;#039;s favorite rhetorical devices and frame the issue with the two extremes. On the one hand, there are those who are completely cynical about politics. But, as the columnist Michael Gerson has put it, this sort of cynicism is the luxury of privileged people. If you live in a functioning society, you can say politicians are just a bunch of crooks. But, if you live in a place without rule of law, where a walk down a nighttime street can be terrifying, where tribalism leads to murder, you know that politics is a vital concern. Does this remotely sound like anything President There Is No Red America And No Blue America ever has said And it takes a rare kind of obliviousness to quote in support a former word &amp;#039;ho from the Avignon Presidency, the one that gave us &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re either with the terrorists or against them.&amp;quot; Is Brooks taking his book leave in the Phantom Zone? On the other hand, there are those who form their identity around politics and look to it to complete their natures. These overpoliticized people come in two forms: the aspirational and the tribal. The aspirational hope that politics can transform society and provide meaning. They were inspired by the lofty rhetoric of John F. Kennedy&amp;#039;s Inaugural Address. The possibilities, he argued, were limitless: &amp;quot;Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.&amp;quot; The world is divided into two kinds of people. And those two kinds of people are divided into two kinds of people. And those two kinds of people are divided into two kinds of people. And Zeno. paradoxically, orders up some more mead and begins to laugh. Then there are those who look to politics for identity. They treat their partisan affiliation as a form of ethnicity. These people drive a lot of talk radio and television. Not long ago, most intelligent television talk was not about politics. Shows would put interesting people together, like Woody Allen with Billy Graham (check it out on YouTube), and they&amp;#039;d discuss anything under the sun. Now most TV and radio talk is minute political analysis, while talk of culture has shriveled. This change is driven by people who, absent other attachments, have fallen upon partisanship to give them a sense of righteousness and belonging. This emotional addiction can lead to auto-hysteria. I, too, miss the afternoon by-play between Merv Griffin and Arthur Treacher. Is Brooks just now noticing that the political movement that formed him and to which he paid his own tribal fealty until it began to lose wars and become as popular as the mange was fueled largely out in the country by bellowing nitwits on the radio? He really has gone back to the garden, hasn&amp;#039;t he? He is stardust. He is golden. Also, politics as &amp;quot;auto-hysteria&amp;quot; sounds bad, unless accompanied by safe words and performed by consenting adults. And were it as widespread as Brooks thinks, wouldn&amp;#039;t David Vitter be on TV a lot more than he is? So if politics should not be nothing in life, but not everything, what should it be? We should start by acknowledging that except for a few rare occasions - the Civil War, the Depression - government is a slow trudge, oriented around essential but mundane tasks. Whoa, there, laddiebuck. The Civil War and the Great Depression were examples of &amp;quot;politics&amp;quot; not being oriented around essential but mundane tasks? See the pea under the shells there? Actually, the politics in both cases came in the solutions to the catastrophes mentioned, and not in the catastrophes themselves. In the case of the Civil War, that was the slow, agonizing process of overcoming the institututional racism of the country&amp;#039;s founding. In the case of the Depression, it was the New Deal and the founding of the modern social contract, which is something of which Brooks made his bones condemning. The scramble back into the respectable Green Rooms can be an ungainly one. Imagine you are going to a picnic. Government is properly in charge of maintaining the essential background order: making sure there is a park, that it is reasonably clean and safe, arranging public transportation so as many people as possible can get to it. But if you remember the picnic afterward, these things won&amp;#039;t be what you remember. You&amp;#039;ll remember the creative food, the interesting conversations and the fun activities. As it happens, I worked in a park for three summers and Brooks is exactly correct here. People are ungrateful bastards. This is the basis for the success of three decades of conservative politics. This is why they so gravitate toward attacks on public employees (like me) and fall as suckers to various privatization scams promoted by politicians for whom David Brooks used to lead cheers. Government is the hard work of creating a background order, but it is not the main substance of life. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, &amp;quot;How small, of all that human hearts endure,/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.&amp;quot; Government can set the stage, but it can&amp;#039;t be the play. It is just too balky an instrument. As we&amp;#039;re seeing even with the Obamacare implementation, government is good at check-writing, like Social Security, but it is not nimble in the face of complexity. It doesn&amp;#039;t adapt to failure well. There&amp;#039;s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. In any federal action, one administrator will think one thing; another administrator will misunderstand and do something else; a political operative will have a different agenda; a disgruntled fourth party will leak and sabotage. You can&amp;#039;t fire anybody or close anything down. It&amp;#039;s hard to use economic incentives to get people moving in one direction. Governing is the noble but hard job of trying to get anything done under a permanent condition of Murphy&amp;#039;s Law. Or in the face of a determined conservative movement determined to sabotage its most basic functions for the purposes of establishing a functional corporate oligarchy. And if Brooks thinks that government &amp;quot;can&amp;#039;t fire anybody,&amp;quot; I suggest he call, say, Scott Walker and ask for a few tips. So one&amp;#039;s attitude toward politics should be a passionate devotion to a mundane and limited thing. Government is essential, but, to switch metaphors ridiculously, it&amp;#039;s the stem of the flower, not the bloom. The best government is boring, gradual and orderly. It&amp;#039;s steady reform, not exciting transformation. It&amp;#039;s keeping the peace and promoting justice and creating a background setting for mobility, but it doesn&amp;#039;t deliver meaning. Can I walk beside you? I have come here to lose the smog. David Brooks has entered Woodstock Nation. Forty-four years too late. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19939/david-brooks-emerges-from-book-leave-120313/>