"I see great things in baseball. It's our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -Walt Whitman
* * *
One great thing about the American experiment in federalism and representative democracy is that the highest expression of its brilliance isn't obvious. It’s not the free market or the social safety nets meant to mitigate its savageries. It’s not working or paying taxes or running for that seat on the school board. It’s not governing or legislating or administering the laws of civil society as they’ve been enumerated. It’s not even when we vote, even if the cloyingly precious stickers — now hallmarks of polling place egress — suggest county election boards are united in thinking otherwise. It’s when we are at leisure, when we are exercising a right that the founding fathers, in a departure from virtually every set of expression of political philosophy to precede it, considered inalienable — the right to pursue happiness, to have some ownership of the most valuable commodity to mortal man: time.