Michael H. Goldhaber

I just sent the following  comment to the NYTimes: “The presumed perpetrator on the plane [i.e., the 12/25 incident on the Amsterdam -Detroit flight ] is now set to be arraigned tomorrow for “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction”. This is an absurd and unnecessary conflation of terms. “WMD” originally meant something like a nuclear weapon, which could have killed many thousands of people. Now, setting off an explosive on a plane is said to be this, when one ground-to-air-missile would have been as lethal. Supposedly, Iraq was targeted for invasion because it was feared to possess WMD’s. But probably every country has them by this new definition. Is this to be an excuse for attacking everyone, everywhere? This inflated language may turn out to be far more deadly than the attempted bombing ever could have been.”

Why is the incident being magnified out of all proportion? for essentially the same reason that terrorsim is committted, that Dubai just dedicated  the absurd tower more than twice as high as the Empire State bldg., that reality show candidates fake a child’s ride in a balloon or crash a state dinner at the White House — namely, to get otherwise unwarranted attention. It is an unending explosion of exaggeration, in which our country now seems plunged, from tea-party-ers to Pres. Obama himself when he reiterates the absurdity that “this is war.” Sending a nut with explosvies in his underwear onto aplane is hardly war, whatever it is better called.

When I wrote about Palin shortly after McCain chose her, I said she did not have enough time to gain fan loyalty in order to have a significant positive effect on McCain’s votes. I think I was right on that, despite her obviously having gotten a big bump in popularity, simply by being a novel sort of candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised, after seeing her disastrous interview with Katie Couric on CBS news, if she in fact does what was bruited about during the Republican convention, namely resign from the candidacy. Maybe McCain could now pick Lieberman.

But McCain has said he is suspending campaigning, ostensibly because of the looming financial mess. He has not said that he will restart his campaign,and perhaps he won’t. This may turn out to become one of the oddest elections in US history, a candidate essentially giving up.

In the Couric interview, Plain did not come across as someone one can easily align one’s mind or emotions with, since she bordered on incoherence of a depth far beyond the worst George W. Bush ever offered, and she looked continually scared, while pretending to be confident, not a winning combination, nor one that it is easy to identify with. I think few people will be won over to her, rather than seeing her as more of an object than a person.

McCain cannot have failed to note that Palin is a disastrous candidate, how cannot keep his campaign afloat. (He would have not gotten much bounce in the polls at all, had he not chosen this unconventional candidate, so he was counting on her for a lot. Barring a disastrous mistake by Obama, McCain probably knows he now cannot win. His choice is get rid of Palin and take a gamble on Lieberman, or just forget the whole thing. I suspect he will find losing badly to be highly humiliating, so he might take the former course, though the precedent (McGovern’s dropping Eagleton in ‘72) is not hopeful for him.

If it does happen, you read it here first. And, by the way, McCain might do really badly in debate himself.

American and probably world financial institutions continued to reel today as an outcome of the credit collapse that began with the sub-prime mortgage mess. Because primary and secondary mortgages and other forms of personal and institutional debt were completely essential for whatever economic strength the old economy has shown since 2001, it seems probable to me that the latest failures are just a harbinger of worse money-economy times to come. However this plays out in detail, it is very likely that the new Attention Economy will grow in importance, and possibly irrevocably take the lead over the old economy, in more and more visible ways.

The facts remain that

1. the money economy is fundamentally an industrial-market economy, based on the production and sale of standardized goods, which

2. due to growing productivity continues to require a decreasing fraction of the world’s potential workforce.

Since 2001, the US economy kept going fitfully, through creating further inequality, through purely financial maneuvering, such as by hedge funds, through consumers’ making ends meet by cashing in on higher home prices through second mortgages, through added construction both residential and commercial, and through a growing luxury market to tend to the newly rich and superrich. That was clearly destined to come undone at some point, and now the point has been reached.
The lack of safeguards in investments, speculation and debt creation allowed the 2001-07 “growth”, and without it the old economy would have gotten anemic that much sooner.

But now, unstable debt instruments piled one on top of the other have led to a disaster that will extend far beyond the financial sector. Pension funds and mutual funds will mostly have dismal or negative returns, which will in themselves affect buying power for many retirees. Businesses will be unable to obtain loans they need to even maintain current efforts. Layoffs and declining work weeks will spread to many sectors. Construction — both residential and commercial — will be curtailed for some time to come. Housing prices will continue to fall as new would-be buyers will find it hard to obtain even prime mortgages. Tax revenues will decline, leading, very likely to government layoffs. And further cuts will arise because of these curtailments in consumer wealth.

More people without work, and finding it difficult, for instance, to afford college or medical care and the like will further involve themselves with the Attention Economy, especially online. As I mentioned in the previous post, the Internet draws in in new modes of attention- seeking and paying, and these in turn draw in more people more tightly to this instantiation of the Attention Economy.. Sooner or later, probably, the monetary economy will revive to a degree, but the growth meanwhile of the Attention Economy will make it less central and less necessary.

Given all this, what can government do, and what kind of program should Obama be putting forth if he hopes to win now? ( I am not yet sure how much government can do, or how much Obama is likely to propose or actually do, but I am pretty sure a McCain triumph would be by far the worse possibility.)
Here are some obvious steps:
1. Take steps to increase and universalize access to the Internet, by a combination of regulation, tax policy and direct subsidy. See to it that affordable and usable two-way Internet connections, including wi-fi, high speed, etc. spread access to all. Encourage easy to use versions of hardware and software, so more can be online. Increase transparency and responsiveness of government agencies at all levels to Internet communications, and make sure what is done online by government is archived permanently. Modify intellectual property laws to allow easier sharing of good ideas and expressions.

2. Devise formulas to modify tariff agreements so that too cheap foreign labor is discouraged in favor of policies that promote decent pay. Also improve environmental standards and working conditions for foreign factories, etc. If done right, these new requirements should aid ordinary people on both sides.

3. Press for a wide range of energy- and resource-saving inventions and practices, and see that they are put into effect. Develop renewable energy methods and devices, and try to sell these abroad, offering them at reduced cost to the neediest countries.

4. Put out-of-work construction workers to work rebuilding some infra-structure such as certain bridges, and making other infrastructure, such as airports and roads more energy conserving.
Vastly increasing educational opportunities in ways that genuinely fit possible careers to to talents and proclivities. That would include new medical and nursing schools.

5. New regulation for financial sector that is robust enough to prevent the equivalent of the curent boom-bubble-bust cycle and ove -generous rewards to bankers who are and financial officers doing little but taking money out one pocket and putting it in another (sometimes known as theft)

…More later…..

Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at the 2008 Democratic Convention, asked whether her supporters backed her just as a person or because of the issues she embraced, implying that of course they should answer: “the latter.” But we know that is not in truth the case. All candidates “flip-flop” to some degree on issues that might be important to their voters, and since no one can foresee exactly what will face successful candidates during the term of office in question, we have to embrace the person over the issues to a considerable extent. But what makes the embrace much stronger now is that the main candidates who received so much exposure and large audiences through the primaries and possibly before are all clearly stars. (The US is by no means the only country in which star power has become highly necessary for political success. The examples of Blair in England, Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy and Koizumi in Japan all used their ability to come across to large audiences as an essential part of their pull. And of course, actual celebrities like Schwarzenegger and Reagan have done well at times in the US. )

Stars, as I define them, are people who get much more attention than they give, and to whom, as a result, we offer up our loyalties in highly personal ways. Once someone is a star her or his fans feel a strong pull to that person, to refuse to substitute anyone else, and to identify with the vicissitudes of the star. People who are for Hillary may transfer their loyalites to Obama if she says so, because they want to please her, though this is not likely to be an easy or complete process. They are now loyal to him to a degree, but he still has to deepen that loyalty, by making it seem he notices and values them.

Meanwhile, of course, the Republicans decry Obama for being a celebrity, as if McCain were not, and then McCain chooses a vice-presidential candidate as much for personal traits as anything else. Now Sara Palin has appeared on the scene and received thundrous applause for her red-meat, rabid speech at the Republican Convention. Meanwhile people watching at home get more of a sense that she is worthy of attention because of the applause of that celebratory crowd in the hall.

So is Palin now a star who is likely to make much difference in the Presidential vote? I very much doubt it. One exposure in the political arena does not turn an unknown into a star for whom a great number of people are likely to work or to change their vote. In the condensed two months before the election, to make a real difference, Palin would have to open herself up to the public to a remarkable degree, and voters would have swoon over what they see. Furthermore, they would have to vote overwhelmingly with heart not head. I strongly suspect that Palin cannot make this work, because she really has little to offer that is positive, beyond a buoyant personality compared with her negative approach on most issues, and her too right-wing stance.

Does this mean Obama will win automatically? No. He has always had an uphill struggle. McCain has some crowd pleasing traits and his POW story. If Obama continues to seem high-minded and presidential, while at the same time emphasizing his own plans to turn the country around, and emphasizing that McCain is just copying his lines out of political expediency, he stands a good chance. The key point is that we have to believe in him, have to feel a deep tug based on his story, on his steadiness, his youth, and the rest.

Like millions of other Americans, I watched Hillary Clinton’s “meltdown,” as the media called it, as an Internet video on Monday January 7, the day before the New Hampshire primary. I am on record as opposing Hillary, for a number of reasons, including dislike of many of her stands such as her belligerent votes on Iraq and Iran, never apologizing for  the Iraq vote, dismay at her connection to the Democratic Leadership Council, and revulsion at the whole notion of perpetuating political “dynasties” (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton). Edwards, not Clinton, has been the candidate I most supported and still support, long shot though he now is. Yet I found myself emotionally touched by seeing Clinton “well up” and by hearing the quaver in her voice.

Even as I felt that, I also was thinking that what she was emotional about was not so much her long commitment to serving the country — millions of people have made that commitment, after all — but rather that her campaign might be faltering, her ambitions of being President might come to naught.
The point is that in paying attention to her, I viscerally felt the emotion she was projecting—regardless of whether she was sincere in projecting it, and regardless of my own reservations about her and what she stands for.  I was, in the terms in which I have explained the act of attention paying, deeply aligned with her. As such I wanted what I took it that she wanted, which was for her to emerge victorious in the NH vote. When she did the next day, I was very pleased. My impression is that many other people reacted much as I did. When you align with someone, you want what they want, even if there may be other reasons you don’t want to go along with what have become your own emotions.

With videos on the Internet enabling more of us to to view particularly emotional moments related to political candidates and others,  we must expect that  the emotional connections that result will play an even larger role than they have in the past, when it comes to deciding whom to vote for. This is not necessarily going to make us eager to support candidates we disagree with too much on other terms, but it will influence us to put relatively small differences aside. We will put less emphasis on the candidate’s “record, “ and more on what they say and how they say it. In 2004 Kerry overemphasized his record in Vietnam, leaving himself open to being “Swift-boated.” With past records less important, outside groups’ abilities ot vilify a candidate n the basis of the pst should play less of a role. That is to the good. What is less attractive is the chance that pure acting skill will allow a candidate to distort who he is and what he is for. George Bush , in my view successfully did this in 2000, with his “compassionate conservative” and “I’m a uniter, not a divider’ lines. These went right along with his “just plain folks” demeanor.

Fortunately, perhaps, in a long campaign, a candidate will have a hard hiding more unpleasant sides, if these exist. They will be circulated on YouTube and be seen by many.  Is it conceivable that eventually highly genuine people with real emotions will turn out to be the new star candidates? If so, will that be good?

Pay attention! This is IMPORTANT, not just my usual blather!

In response to an earlier post of mine, Paul Salomone writes, in part:
“…it’s not just that ALL people need to have a more equal share of the attention wealth, but IMPORTANT people and ideas (read: necessary for the healthy and happy functioning of global society) do even more so.”

I don’t think this demand makes real sense, understandable though it may be. Meanwhile, in an attempt to deal with too many calls on our attention, people or companies such as Seriosity try to come up with ways to quantify how much attention something ought to be worth, presumably based on how “important” it is. These efforts too are doomed, but why?

How can we understand what importance is, from an Attention Economic perspective? In this perspective, recall, the attention that matters is only what goes, directly or indirectly, from human to human.

1.
Saying something is important is first of all a ploy — conscious or not — for getting attention. You ask others to see the world through your eyes, urging that in so doing they will better be able to pay attention to themselves or others. However, the way you put it is that you are just pointing out the way the world truly is, not just how you see it.

(If you are being truthful, of course, you do report the world is as you truly believe. However, inevitably, in demanding attention for your version of the world, you are also demanding attention for yourself and perhaps for some of those who see as you do.)

If you are one of the main people who draws attention to this aspect of the world, many others may align with you, and you become an “important person.” If it happens you are already a star of some sort — and thus massively attention-getting anyway —already a VIP, or “Very Important Person” — by insisting that something is important, you automatically make it so. And you become still more of a VIP.

But can’t things be intrinsically important, without humans deciding so? They cannot. Even if the world were scheduled to blow up tomorrow, that would only be important if we cared, though in this extreme case we certainly would. We would because it would affect us in an extreme way.  A planet the size of earth two million light years away can blow up without our caring, and if so it would be unimportant. To put it another way, we humans evolved in a world essentially without meaning, until we invented meaning and imparted it to things we are capable of noting and categorizing and having feelings about. We pass on such meanings when getting the attention of the next generation and getting them to align with us, and that has a lot to do with how we pass on importance too.

Deciding that something is important is a social process, depending on at least a shared alignment as to the urgency of a certain action or viewpoint, usually in response to someone’s capacity to get and hold attention around this, and sometimes to a shared perception that gets translated into immediate action (panicking in a flood or an earthquake, let’s say).

2.
“The sky is falling!” “Terrorists are coming!” “Humans are causing global warming!”  “The US is in danger of falling behind China!”  “Remember, never use dangling participles!” “Barry Bonds’s records don’t count; he took steroids!” “Wolves are at the door!” “We are ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ [title of Neil Postman’s 1980’s  book]!” Almost anything can seem deeply important to someone.

A baby can get attention by smiling, cooing or crying. A slightly older child can say “pay attention to me” or pull on a parent’s sleeve, or even slap someone to get attention. At a slightly later age, a child becomes aware that pointing out things about the world can be attention demanding, especially if it is in the form of claiming a certain urgency. That’s importance. Other ways to get attention include making funny jokes, learning and showing off skills, making things, etc. But if just being entertaining or artistic or interesting doesn’t do it, there remains the importance ploy.

In the early cave period, when I was a child, I was repeatedly told the story of “the boy who cried wolf.” The point was that you must not falsely claim you have something important to say, because if you do that often enough, when there actually is a wolf you will not get anyone’s attention and will end up eaten. As the repeated telling of this fable itself illustrates, adults of course use the importance ploy to get attention from children, with varying success. And they use it towards each other, with ever-greater frequency.

3.
As I have argued elsewhere, attention is not synonymous with time. Nonetheless, like every human action the act of paying attention must take place in time, and so is limited by the time available. Suppose you decided to spend your entire waking life paying equal attention to everyone else in the world, all six billion of us. You would have only about a third of a second to devote to each person. If you happen to be American and limit your attention to the three hundred million Americans, that would still afford you only about 7 seconds for each. Thus, it is almost inevitable that many will want more than their fair share. A third of a second or seven seconds just does not seem enough. Many might settle for much less than the whole world’s attention, but as long as some do not, and there is no intrinsic personal limit stopping them, the competition for attention will certainly continue to increase at all levels.

As the competition for attention heats up, and as the possible world audience keeps growing, the number of claims of importance keeps rising and diversifying. They often get shriller, as well, as they must in the face of the growing competition.

4.
If you pay attention to someone who says something is important, that is if you at least partially align with her, you do want to do something about it. Importance claims demand action of some sort. But often this action will consist of trying to get the attention of still more important people, people who somehow can actually “change things.” That gets frustrating, in several ways. It’s hard to get their attention, first of all. And these people who can change things want to get and keep your and others’ attention. So they find it easier and easier to give lip service to “important” topics, but not necessarily easier to do anything about them.

Take the Iraq war. A preponderance of the American public wants it to end and thinks that is important. But there seems to be nothing they can do individually to get attention from those who can effect that outcome, and it is only one of many topics that get some attention. So it’s easier to focus on something else.

5.
Suppose everyone in the world agrees that such and such is important. Then little or no attention can be gotten by merely re-iterating that.

Whenever some people get attention for an issue they think is important, they automatically create an opening for those who choose to say that the opposite —or perhaps some variant — is more important — hinting that this alternative, if attended to, will help the audience pay more attention to themselves or those who they want to pay attention to (say, their children, friends or stars) than the other choice will.

In truth, a large number of people with very disparate mindsets have their own issues, their own pet peeves or pet hopes, their own sense of what is most important and most  “necessary for the healthy and happy functioning of global society, as Salomone puts it ”. That’s not always so good. Even Hitler justified the Holocaust on the basis that Jews were an “unhealthy” presence in the world. Hitler was an anti-Semite of long standing, but it seems one reason he so emphasized this was that he found when speaking to German audiences angry about their defeat in WWI, he got much bigger crowds and applause …much more attention, in effect, when he trotted out this hatred.

Paul Salomone is disgusted that people waste their time paying attention to the Paris Hiltons of the world. Hitler, after taking power, rid German museums and art galleries of what he considered “degenerate art” including cubist, abstract, and expressionist works. When he decreed that these works should be put on display so that the populace could share in his disgust, instead Germans flocked to the show out of genuine interest in this art.

Of course, it is vast hyperbole to put Salomone and Hitler in the same paragraph. Yet the comparison indicates the problem. How do we decide what is important? Is there any way we can just pay attention to truly important things? Attention equality (that is, equal attention to each and every person) would clearly be impossible to enforce, but is attention to what is important in any way a more usable criterion? Who would apply it?

6.
Importance is going to continue to be decided on the basis of what positions and statements get attention and through and by whom. But we can expect endless logjams as important issues and personalities pile up. Things that are deemed important in this way are first seen as problems. Then, possible solutions seem important. Then come reservations about the solutions.

Meanwhile, many will change the channel, preferring amusement to frustration. That’s better by far than starting wars or genocides, a cruder way to try to be important or see to it that “important” changes actually happen.

7.
I don’t mean at all to suggest that nothing is important. I have my own collection of issues that I view as such. I prefer diplomacy instead of war-making, oppose arms sales, favor energy conservation improvements to stop global warming, want better teaching of arts and music in public schools, want all drugs legalized but sold for low cost by the government, want everyone to have broadband Net access, want better protection for citizens of the Eastern Congo, and better protection for elephants, and on and on. And of course I think proper understanding of the Attention Economy is important. Some of these are more important to me than others. But these reflections leave me with fewer illusions that what I want is likely to permeate enough minds to make a difference.

Each of us has an implicit or explicit list of what is most important, of what we most want fellow citizens of the world or those who are already most important top ay attention to. But my reflections here suggest that actual change is most likely when it seems pretty unimportant, happening almost in the shadows, or at best merely micro-important.

In the past three or four years, the Internet has become vastly important for politics. Bloggers like “Daily Kos” help determine how “the grass-roots” will respond to  actions by Congress or the President. Move-On members send petitions on this and that, quite frequently. Listservs pass around messages to “Call your Congressperson;” specific candidates’ campaigns build support and receive contributions and obtain volunteers through vast numbers of e-mails they send out. And so on. Similar things happen at more local levels.

However, once elected, politicians rarely respond to all this online activity except by occasionally changing their votes. The public takes for granted that actual policies and actual compromises will be worked out, whether in public or behind the scenes, in Washington, DC, state capitals, county seats, or city halls. Politicians, usually elected on the basis of very local records, find themselves swamped with policy decisions involving myriad details about countless areas in which they do not know much. They turn to the “experts,” who are sometimes government workers, sometimes Congressional staffers, or, very often, paid lobbyists. Occasionally groups from think tanks or academia help formulate bills. But not the general public.

Opinions are spread on the Internet, but policy, so far, is not formulated. It does not have to be that way. In fact, if we are to have democracy, it can no longer remain that way.

Just as there is open-source software, we need, even more vitally, open-source policy. How would this work? Well, the details may have to await the development of special software, but the broad outlines are evident. Take an issue like getting out of Iraq. Should we? Should we not? The very question is being fought basically in sound bites. Even deeply concerned and interested members of the public have no forum to thrash out alternatives, much less to go into details as to how withdrawal might occur, what the possible outcomes might be, how to deal in advance with difficulties, how to move foreign policy on a new path. Too many of us are too willing to leave these questions to the “experts,” who for the most part have particular axes to grind, or are part of militarist mindset that gets no real challenge within the standard confines of the punditocracy.

Imagine a thousand — or twenty thousand — grand-jury like setups, except operating not in confinement but thorough Internet groups, gathering evidence, examining witnesses, looking at historic examples, trying to reason out what is new, dividing up the issues into sizes not too large for twenty or thirty people to master, trying to work out compromises between different viewpoints, trying to develop a consensus, that, like good software,  is quite resilient to criticism since it will have taken into account many perspectives already.

Would this attempt just lead to the kind of gridlock we are so used to  around important issues in Washington and elsewhere? I think not. Too much of that gridlock is caused by politicians always having to please not only their constituents but those who offer camping funds. That would not be a problem if, say, a million people got involved in devising a strategy to extricate us from Iraq, or if another million were where to come up with a sane policy on global warming, or another million on immigration, yet another million on health care, and so on. None of these people would have to worry about getting re-elected or (in the case of term limits) moving on to some other positioning the public eye.   Once their solutions come before the wide public, and have any remaining rough edges smoothed, they should prove very strong and durable. Much better than a process of a few hundred representatives deciding so many issues for a  nation of a third of a billion, more or less. It would be very hard for Congress or the President to evade the compelling policies so proposed, and so well backed.

Remember, the public took less time to change its mind on Iraq than the politicians did. That says something not about the individuals in Washington, but about the rottenness of the current political process itself. It does not work very well because politicians are always watching their backs, always to some degree for sale, always more interested in looking good than being good. That is what the current system practically assures.

Some new stars might arise in the process I propose, but they would be stars, first of all, to the well-informed  (though all that work) groups who might become their fans. Thye would be good spokespeople for a worthy position.

As I said, I don’t know in detail yet how to put together a system that would make this feasible, but I think we need to move towards it, starting now. Will we get there? There are no guarantees, but what do we have to lose?

When Palestinian suicide bombers blow themselves up, they nearly always have participated in a video, to be shown on TV (and now, the Internet) right after their deaths. It’s a difficult but quick way to achieve a kind of immortality, not in the next world, but this.

Iraqi terrorists have a somewhat different pattern, more likely to be visible (at least from the back) when they are executing some poor hostage. The suicide bombers oddly seem satisfied with anonymity, at least so I glean from news reports. Even if they wanted attention, the fact that several of them seem to die every day would mean they would not get much individual publicity anyway, although their actions certainly do get on TV. Just today a few bombers managed to kill well over a hundred and fifty in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, of course, American attention has been focused not on the boring Iraq occupation, but on the shootings at Virginia Tech. Of course, everyone who has ever gone to an American college or has sent a child to one can easily align with the victims. Further, reporters can flock to Blacksburg with little fear of being shot or bombed themselves. As horrible as the event is, it is perfect for getting attention on American media. And we should not be surprised that the apparent shooter thought so too. Unhinged as he evidently was, he had no trouble realizing that merely by killing so many and then himself, he would get on TV and YouTube.

The shooter set a new record for killing on an American campus (at least if we don’t count the 1927 bombing of a school by a school board member). Why? Was this just rage, or was there method in his madness? Had he killed, say, just two or three, he would not have got the headlines he did. By setting a record that we can only hope will endure for a very long time, he assures himself many future mentions and much attention to his various expressions. He was a student of creative writing, in part, and very few such students will get their work read so widely.  It is repulsive to think that snuffing out so many lives is a way to gain so much attention, but the fact is that it is. (Of course, in its early days, and still now, the money economy rewarded the taking of life in several ways — through arms sales, through paying mercenary soldiers, through unsafe working conditions, and more than once through violently breaking strikes. Sometimes the death toll  was much higher than in Blacksburg.)

Had the same shooter been in Iraq, even with the videos, etc., no long-term attention would have been likely. President Bush, who certainly bears considerable blame for the carnage in Iraq, mostly keeps silent about it. For this set of murders, for a change, he is probably blameless, so he rushed to Blacksburg to appear on TV delivering a vapid and unnecessary statement. Would the university community be less able to mourn or to begin what must be a slow healing process without him? Would the country be feeling any different if he had just issued a few words of condolence via his press secretary?

Of course, I feel a little uncomfortable adding to the excessive commentary on this. The more commentators like me seek to get attention by referring to the shootings, the more likely it is that some copycat will try to outdo the record. In fact, someone in the Boston area has already boasted that he would. Certainly there are plenty of disturbed people, plenty who are suicidal, plenty who are angry, and plenty who are willing to pay a huge price to get attention. Cho himself referred in one of his rants to the Columbine killers —who acted nearly exactly eight years ago, so even he was copying.

But, fortunately for us, something seems to prevent this country from turning into Iraq, as it is now. One possibility is that we do have plentiful outlets for seeking attention aside from mass murder.  (Cho, if  his word counts for anything, possibly did want to get attention for just bomb threats, but felt thwarted when he was not caught.) Large segments of ethnic groups, despite considerable hurt, do not seem to have quite such deep reasons to be vengeful. There is no reason I know of to suppose that suicide bombers in Iraq (nor even some of the American military) enjoy better mental health than Cho apparently did. But in those circumstances bombing or shooting may be as obvious an outlet as yelling in response to an unseen voice is here. Perhaps we need to develop more platforms from which the insane can seek a hearing.

What a couple of weeks it has been for politics as performance: the AG, AG (i.e., the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales) instead of carrying out whatever duties make the AG-ship an important cabinet post, has been spending the week rehearsing for his upcoming appearances before Congressional Committees; President Bush, appearing before the National Cattlemen’s Association vowed again to veto the money bills for the Iraq  escalation and pretended that Congress’s second-guessing him on Iraq was akin to Congress interfering with the details of Normandy landings in WWII; in Iraq itself,  Senator McCain visited a market in a flak jacket surrounded by 100 paratroopers and two helicopters, and pronounced it safe; and in Guantanamo, David Hicks, an Australian convert to Islam, somehow caught in Afghanistan,  was allowed to go nearly free provided he promises not to press charges of torture against the military nor speak to reporters for a year.

Yet, despite the current President’s seemingly deep involvement in staged presentation, such as dancing on the aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished sign” in 2003, or his bragging “Bring it on!” challenge to Iraqi resistance shortly later, in some familial way, he just doesn’t get it. In the terms of my last blog entry, they both mistake the new power of attention to a star for the old power of authority. This then is a tale of the two Bushes, who seem to have mastered the intricacies of campaigning, but deeply misunderstand how post-industrial  leadership actually can work, along with how it can’t.

Let me start with a personal vignette. In 1985, when Reagan was in office, I gritted my teeth and went to the White House to see my father receive a medal from that “acting President.”  There was Reagan, large as life, giving a good reading from his teleprompter. About 8 feet behind him, on a diagonal, was the Vice, George H. W. Bush, squinting to read the teleprompter as well. I had the distinct impression he was prepared to leap in should Reagan suddenly drop dead so as to continue the speech without missing a beat. Later, though, another thought occurred to me: Bush was following Reagan around like a puppy dog because he wanted to learn how to be so popular.

In 1988, the Republicans nominated Bush père to succeed his unwitting acting teacher. Using his lessons, the new candidate got one of Ronnie’s best speechwriters, Peggy Noonan, to write his acceptance speech, and he rehearsed it well. It included a couple of key lines: the modified Clint Eastwood-Dirty Harry of  “Read my lips — no new taxes,” and the altogether discordant wish for “A kinder, gentler nation.”  In the event, coming from behind, H.W. ran an unkind, ungentle campaign and won. Once in office, though, he assumed that the need to perform was over., and the acting lessons were out the window.  He was going to run the country as any Wall Street executive would, with— he assumed— little need to play a role anymore. “Read my lips” would not be necessary; that line about taxes had just been campaign verbiage, as forgettable as all that “kinder, gentler”  goo.

After a couple of years, Bush I decided he was going to use force to get Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait — which Saddam had probably thought Bush had given him a green light to invade in the first place. Congress insisted on a vote, so suddenly the managerial Bush once again had to try to appeal to the nation. He or his writers came up with the ridiculous line that Saddam was as bad as Hitler, thus invoking the feelings of justification for World War II. He also encouraged Shiites and Kurds to revolt from Saddam’s Sunni Arab rule. Then, after American forces (along with numerous allies) had easily pushed the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, Bush turned off the rhetoric and stopped the fighting, leaving Shiites and Kurds to be massacred for their efforts. The idea that Saddam was Hitler, having done its work, was retired and never heard from again.

In short, Bush I acted with the arrogance of a ruler, ruling almost by divine right, with the right to say whatever he wanted, but whose words were just tools to achieve effects. Since he had the right to rule — in his mind, anyway— there was nothing wrong with issuing statements he didn’t mean.

Do you see the pattern? Bush I was swept aside by Clinton I, who never promised much but, despite his cavils on the copula “is,” basically was sincere, whatever he said, and saw himself in a love affair with his audience. But then came Bush II, with his disappearing “compassionate conservatism,” and his subsequent use of the terror of terrorism to attain  electoral victory through wars — victories which he thought he could then use for whatever he wanted. Immediately upon being “re-elected” in 2004, Bush minor announced he was going to spend the “political capital” that thought he had won on something he had hardly mentioned before — redoing Social Security. He did not really understand the need to persuade and perform , to do what it takes, in the permanent campaign to stay popular and entertaining, which means grasping what his audiences wants or else lead them to want something else. Bush II , like Bush I, rules (or tries to)  in a now archaic way —by divine right, as “the decider.”   It does not bother him that the reasons given for invading Iraq were never valid and that the public has caught on at last that they were not. The words worked when they were supposed to; that was all that mattered.

The one “lesson”  George the lesser  possibly learned from his father’s failure to win re-election  was rigidity: never withdraw; never admit mistakes; never apologize for inadequacies such as revealed by Katrina. Bush II, more than Bush I has adopted the basic “acting President” mode of Ronald Reagan, except that he doesn’t really bother to act particularly sincere, probably because he isn’t. He tries to play the same role always, but he fails to grasp the need to check that the audience is eating it up.

By now, you or I, with his horrible record and the huge number or scandals and inadequacies connected with his administration, would probably be cowering in a fetal position, resigning, or trying very hard to change course, but Bush doesn’t even seem to notice he has lost his touch. On the one hand shielded by a motley, still loyal entourage of right-wing kooks, Bush doesn’t look beyond it; he is as cosseted from reality as any big star. But on the other hand, he takes the Presidency to be a kingship that is his, not a stage on which to perform. This is a basic misunderstanding of the direction of history.

Bush II and Cheney represent the old economy, in fact one of the oldest parts of it, the extractive industries — even though Shrub’s only real financial success came not through oil but baseball — an attention –centered industry, highly dependent on the players as well as the fans. But being of the Bush dynasty, he has not noticed this.  To be sure, Reagan and Clinton I probably didn’t consciously realize they were Attention-Economy presidents either, but instinctively they knew it. My guess is from now on, we shall have Presidents more fully conscious of the stagey aspects of their essential roles for this era.

If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination in ’08, wins the election and runs for re-election, by 2016 no one under 50 will ever have voted in a presidential election without a Bush or a Clinton. (If she doesn’t win, will it be because Obama surpassed her as a rock star. Or because Gore has an Oscar?) Like the Danish kings alternating for over 400 years between the names Christian and Frederick, our Presidents just may alternate between Clinton and Bush forever. Why should this be? Why has nothing like this ever occurred before in the preceding 210 years of the republic? My answer is that increasingly the presidency is a stage, and the vote for it is more and more like a vote for the next host on the Tonight show.

Over my entire life, the more personable candidate has practically always won, though name and face recognition has helped too. Hillary is very familiar by now. Running for office has become a very carefully choreographed event, and, for most Presidents — along with other pols— holding office is just as much a staged presentation as running itself. The presidency itself confers instant attention, whoever the occupant of the office, because the White House press corps, many hundreds strong, get their own attention from their closeness to the Prez. And holding office increasingly consists of simply acting the part, as the latest Bush Administration so amply attests.

Bush might have made it through two terms with high popularity according to the old southern conditional “the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” except the creek, i.e. the Missisippi did rise, swamping the Big Easy, and revealing the Potemkin village character of the Bush presidency a little too blatantly. (According to a north Georgia paper, the original phrase, referred to the Creek nation not rising against white settlers, in which case it is doubly relevant if Iraqis can stand for Creeks. )

Of course, satisfying as large an audience as is necessary to have high standing as President for eight years is a difficult task, but even those who succeed pretty well, such as Bill Clinton, are still more successful as crowd pleasers than administrators. We can expect this problem to get worse not better.

The deeper problem is that adequate governance has to be rethought in the attention-economy era. In the MMI past, the main functions of government were maintaining adequate conditions for commerce and assuring some degree of material equality. But now, increasingly, even material well-being hinges on having adequate amounts of attention. Health care, for instance, is largely a matter of getting professional attention, but that is just one crude example.

How (or if) government can equitably allocate attention is not obvious. Certainly the problem is not anywhere in the typical politician’s mind. Rather the primary goal is to enhance the politician’s own supply. We could call this “attention-corruption,” but how can this get on radar screens without some attention corruption of our own?

More to follow…..