Dan grinned at me as he banged out 10 … 11 … 12 on the wooden keys connected to the big booming bells of McGraw Tower. The clumsy, powerful decree of noon sounded for miles, and he and I knew it was noon. But the silly ants marching below had no idea that this was a singular, grinning noon. That was our secret.

Dan, a close friend from home, was visiting the sun-bathed mini-Enlightenment they call “summer in Ithaca” before he headed off to Navy flight school. For a moment up there, as the campus lay nearly empty below us, I couldn’t help but feel … powerful. And I grinned too.

It wasn’t a musical grin. And let me be clear — it wasn’t a flirtatious grin. (If you were asking that, in fact do not ask, and he will not tell. Thank you.) I couldn’t quite decide what kind of grin it was.

And then it felt like a political grin. Yes, a gala fundraiser grin. An on-top-of-the-world grin. Something that, when I thought about it, I didn’t quite like.

If we were back in kindergarten and you asked me to paint a picture of politics, I’d probably give you a man, in black shoes and white shirt, slaving away in a gray office over black-and-white memos about black-and-white ideas. And if, like me, you’re awfully depressed by such an aesthetic, you’d crumple up my chiaroscuran (black and white) masterpiece and cry or something.

But politicians in smoky rooms don’t know how to cry. They are so dulled by such a politics that they call it a “game.” This is politics at its worst: a game. And this game is played, we might imagine,by players who “crush a lot.”

I know that it’s not cool to hate on Big Pun, so let’s just use the analogy of a faceless “playa.” When you are really being a “playa,” “bros before hos” does not always stick as the axiom it is supposed to. In fact, the two concepts seem diametrically opposed. So “crushing a lot,” between guys, means straight up violence, wherein you end up with your “bro’s” bling imprinted in your cheek, and a few less teeth than before.

However, this “crushing a lot,” is 100% gendered, which means that for all the ladies out there, it’s a whole different kind of getting crushed. More like a crush party, or the straight pimp game. A good kind of getting crushed — if it is you and not the other girl.

And where these two different types of crushing intersect — at Rulloff’s, perhaps — you have the gender-specific grin. The grin that one sex adores and giggles at and the other sex finds arrogant and distasteful. The “Sup, baby?” and its corollary: “Bro, I think she digs me. Not you. Back off.” It’s all in a grin: the way humans can privilege some people while shutting out others.

And isn’t it natural enough, but just as frightening, that such a grin is manifested in politics too?

I’m talking about those grins that politicians and big donors share at their gala dinners. And those grins they share with their hosts, the media personalities, in between segments of News 24/7, No Matter What Crazy Shit We Have to Pull to Keep You Watching! The camera stops rolling and, “DAMN! It feels good to be on top! I can’t believe they watch this stuff all day!” One can almost imagine Bill O’Reilly saying that to his fawning guests. Or at least he smiles at them, and DAMN, does he mean that or what?

And that smile, that exclusive smile, is all the more meaningful because it isn’t for the ants marching below. They get the plastic, made-for-TV smile, but the genuine one, that is only for the top, the studio, the White House.

In Max Weber’s famous essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” he writes that “we are all ‘occasional’ politicians when we cast our ballot … ” while a select few are politicians by profession. So in a democracy, does that make us occasionally democratic, while the people who pursue politics as a vocation — by working as elected officials or party agents — are always democratic?

But shouldn’t we be democratic all the time? Not just every November? How would we do that?

Some thoughts, then.

First thought: what is a political event? Something that matters to a lot of people. Corrollary: that means anything could be a political event.

Second thought: the mass media decide everything we hear about events beyond our everyday lives. So, how do the mass media know what really matters to people? Easy! Market research.

Now, the problem with that is that it’s the wrong question. The question of market research is “what would you watch?” or “what can we get you to watch?” And the point of that question is to see how many viewers the network can get, and how much advertising money?

The right question is: what matters to us? And I suspect that if we asked that we would have a very different politics, because what we think of as “political events” would be different.

So this is an honest proposal to democratize politics: we need to vote on what the media reports. CNN plays just as big a role in politics as any senator does. So if we vote for our senators, we should vote on what CNN reports. We need to vote on what questions the pollsters ask to begin with — otherwise they define the categories for us. Market research needs to become human research.

The other part of this proposal is that instead of letting politics — stuff that matters — be defined by media corporations, we define it ourselves.

We can make politics into what some think is non-politics. Fifty years ago, in the “Summer of Love” 1967, people realized that love really mattered. Love matters to people. Put it on TV. Listen if you are in Washington.

Even if we smoke less weed now, I think this could be the kind of grin we spread, and it’s democratic. If we reinvent the political, we can reinvent that slimy political grin, the one I discovered when I grinned at Dan on top of the clocktower.

After all, a smile is too precious a thing to shove in an office and bury in papers and market research.

We ought to take the smile back. We ought to get involved. We ought to… well, what do you think we ought to do?

Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.