Politics isn't just Washington — it's the dog park, the gas pump, and the in-laws down the hall. James Navé goes solo this week.
Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé.
This week I go solo to ask what politics actually means once you set aside Washington and look at the rest of life. The word conjures conflict and right- and left-wing camps, but I trace it instead through dog parks, Miss Manners' etiquette, and the small, constant negotiations — and quiet shames — that hold any community together.
Miss Manners’ (Judith Martin’s) dog-park protocol and her sly solution for houseguests who are "not quite married" open the conversation, followed by three Walt Whitman poems — "There Was a Child Went Forth," "I Hear America Singing," and "O Captain! My Captain!" — that trace the same governance at a national scale.
I also turn to Deadwood, David Milch's HBO series, where profanity gives way to formality as a lawless mining camp invents its own rules. Along the way: six dollars for diesel at the pump in Asheville, a friend's mayoral tenure in a five-hundred-person Oregon town, and a nudge to vote this November.
Politics, it turns out, starts at the first cry and never really stops.