Governance is complex, difficult, and on the whole, thankless - why ever should the Bright Young Things leave the management of their hotels, newspapers, banks, TV channels and corporations to join, like fleas on a behemoth, the government? Wherein lies the difference between the two worlds?
If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone.
When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog's natural life - biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night... But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees!
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.