I was away from the spectacle that is national politics for five days and four nights this past week. I missed nothing for there is nothing to report but bitterness, vendetta, and obstinacy – three societal virtues present in our elected “leaders”. No wonder the public is so very cynical.

Hobbes seems almost quaint, especially with all the brutishness, never mind the nasty in today’s body politic. The one thing that life is certainly not anymore is short - the political process has never been longer, especially since our attention spans are about the same as that of a hummingbird, as we flip through channels and loudly announce that there is nothing new on TV.

The Bush administration seems to have been in office for an eternity. This war is nearly five years old, longer than the Civil War, and with no end in sight, it seems even longer when there isn’t hope for victory only the potential for a settlement in the distant future. Nobody even knows what victory looks like and this cultural ennui is fierce in its effect, the apathy of the masses, the dulled novocain of the soul, dulled from bad news from a corrupt administration. Such is the thing when mediocrity is the highest expectation.

The media are in their full cycle of summertime mania. Soon they will be dashing from amber alert to shark attacks; once August is here we won’t know a good story from a sham one. Thank God for Harry Potter for without the Boy Who Lived to distract us and fill page after page of commentary and analysis, we wouldn’t have any news but for the sexual escapades of a conservative senator and sexual abuses of archdioceses.

A five day respite from all of this has made me learn a lesson that I learned and forgotten after every vacation. The events of one week are seldom the stuff of lasting concern. The events of some years even, are hardly transformative. The scandal today is the forgotten relic of the past for most of us, though not for those in Washington, who sit so far removed from our collective mentality.

People care about the big things in their own little worlds. Their children, the dentist’s office, the recent diagnosis, a consumer tax raise, and spending money. This is the stuff for concern in most of our lives, as it should be, but is seldom the concern of our government. For all the lip service paid to the average American, both Washington and the media seem to know little about him/her.