Distractions

Dick Meyer is one of our more thoughtful commentators and always a pleasure to read, even when I disagree with him, and his column today is no exception. He presents a thought provoking thesis in Barack, Britney, Rudy And Anna Nicole:

News Is Entertainment, But Then So Is Politics, Says CBSNews.com’s Dick Meyer

It has been a truism since the invention of television that politics has become more like entertainment. That truism is now too generous.

Much of what we call entertainment isn’t. It is, rather, gossip and voyeurism pertaining to celebrities who may or may not be entertainers: Britney, Anna Nicole and Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband.

Similarly, much of what we call politics isn’t. The zany scrutiny of Mitt, Rudy, McCain, Hillary, Barack and Edwards 18 months before the 2008 election is gossip, fantasy and voyeurism masquerading as serious politics and statecraft. It is a form of societal distraction just as much as celebrity rehab watching is. Just as obsessing over Anna Nicole’s autopsy is a relief from credit card debt, dull jobs and dented Dodges, dissecting the latest dust-up between staffers for Hillary and Barack is a distraction from an Iraq problem that has no solution, a healthcare system that has cancer and an entitlement system that will screw our kids. The cliques are just different.

Dick Meyer concludes that the political elite needs Rehab.  I think he has the right diagnosis but an incomplete grasp of the etiology.

For my money, the single greatest deterrent to a more rational approach to public policy, a less cantankerous civic climate and a reversal of the decline in trust in government is the structure of the campaign system. It is a bi-opoly financed in an arcane way that deters many highly qualified participants and creates systemic disincentives for effective government policy-making. While the entitlement program quagmire is more than important than campaign shenanigans 18 months before Election Day, semi-intelligent repairs on entitlements will not occur until the campaigning system goes into detox.

There are very good reasons that so much time and energy are being spent on Anna Nicole’s remains and Britney’s shaved parts, and the horse races for the respective nominations.

First allow a slight digression.

When a person attends to inconsequential fluff rather than serious problems, the turning toward ephemeral distractions usually serves a defensive purpose. If a person prefers to obsessively attend to talking heads speculating about who Anna Nicole’s baby’s father is, rather than worry about how he is going to pay for his health insurance, the distraction succeeds in temporarily allaying anxiety.

Our political elite’s preoccupation with non-binding resolutions, jockeying for position in 2008, and various other forms of political theater serves a powerful defensive function. In point of fact, there is a growing sense that events are spinning out of control and no one has any idea how to stop the train with no brakes.

In reality, this represents much more than anxiety about Iran. I have written on many occasions about the anxiety that is inevitable when the increasingly accelerating pace of change (in technology and, especially, in our increased access to information) outruns our ability to metabolize the changes occurring in our lives. Biological systems tend to be conservative (a satiated lion sleeps rather than hunts); our brains and minds are conservative. We attempt to fit new data into pre-existing templates that schematize for us how the world operates. In other words, adaptation to changing conditions always takes time, and we resist new paradigms, usually until the old one fails catastrophically. When change occurs relatively slowly, it is easy to adapt. Until recent times, most people led predictable lives, punctuated for the unfortunate by the disruption of war; disruptive technologies came along infrequently and were adopted slowly. Now, change is occurring so quickly and the future looks so uncertain, that our adaptive capacities are being exceeded. This produces great anxiety.

(In technical terms, when the ego’s capacity to adapt is overwhelmed, it is traumatic; we are living in a world of increasingly traumatized people.)

This represents at a fundamental level the tension between totalitarian systems, which create a schema of stasis and exchange anxiety for the future with fear in the present, and free societies, which encourage change and exchange fear in the present for anxiety in the future.

Our politicians do not talk about the break down of the international status quo, which since the Second World War maintained a relative stability, a framework, through which to make the world understandable. With the end of the Soviet Colossus, the world became a much more free, but more chaotic and unstable, place. The Democrats look back to an illusory stability provided by the UN and diplomacy between nation states. The Republicans look at a world polarized between those Nations that are with us and those that are against us. There are very few thinkers looking forward to a world increasingly dominated by trans-national players with increasing capabilities to do harm to people everywhere.

A Jacksonian has been writing about these developments at his blog, which deserves wider attention. His posts tend to be quite long (some of his posts make mine look short and in our short attention span environment, this can be a liability) but are always worth your time. He sent me an e-mail which lays out some of what I believe is the background noise in the system that adds to our anxiety:

My view on the regime [Iran-SW] is that it is acting more in line with that of a criminal organization on the interior vice its own people - as witness the hiring of Chechns and other people from the 'stans being used against student protesters last summer. The cross-affiliationn of groups throughout that region makes those sorts of hired thugs a fungible commodity from Georgia to Kyrgystan.

The regime exterior outlook is one that I am, quite frankly, terrified of even *without* WMDs as they are setting up a self-sustaining, inter-networked terror system so that even if Iran goes away, as in drops off the face of the planet, the system remains and is integrated in its various regions (ie. Lebanon, Venezuela, Bosnia, Chechnya, KSA). The cross-integration with the criminal organizations, especially the Far Eastern Triads and North Korean criminal operations is something that will give them a ready fund supply as an independent network. Also in S. America the internetworking with FARC will allow for the utilization of the narcotics trade as witness that agent in Canada taking 3 tons of pseudoephedrine down to Mexico to get gangs there to turn it into meth. Those gang connections did not crop out of *nowhere*. So even with Iran stopped dead cold, the multiple terror organizations are as lethal if not more lethal a threat in that no Nation has been able to deal with them before this.

His attention is on Iran, but it is clear that his points apply to the entire panoply of Islamic terrorist/criminal inter-relations. To this point, there is no national consensus, let alone international consensus, and very little in the way of international discussion, about how best to manage our evolution into a world of trans-national actors who often wield more power than traditional nation states.

Add the anxiety of an unknown and dangerous international climate to the increased personal insecurity so many feel in a world in which your job, your company, your health care, your climate, all feel unstable, and the temptation to focus on the horse race instead of what happens when the winner has to figure out what to do the day after his or her inauguration, becomes compelling.