I had this moderately pithy thought just now: "Politics is gossip, overlaid with the thin veneer of something that actually matters."

Except that's not necessarily true. Politics, at its purest, is the perfect melding of philosophy with human interaction. It's just that gossip is easier and quicker for people, so it usually devolves into that, especially in a mass-media-based culture such as ours.

Gossip? For all its bad reputation, at its heart it is nothing more than an attempt to make sense of the vagaries of human behavior, and connect with others while doing so. I wouldn't call that something that doesn't matter.

And philosophy is, I believe, the endless pursuit of black and white building blocks beneath a shifting sea of greys.