Attention Whoring and Our Better Angels

With great music and oratory from past inaugurations and present stages

Hello, dear readers. I wish you all a meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Lately I’ve been making connections, as we do, between disparate cultural phenomena. Some of these connections may be surprising. I thought I’d share them with you in a quick essay. If you like, weigh in with your attention strategies in the comments. I’m always happy to hear from you.

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The morning after Trump was re-elected to the presidency, a social media friend posted this:

“I am not my country. I am myself. I will not cry over America again. Keeping emotional distance, but moving forward against the tide, the wind, the hate, the decline.”

I was afraid she’d be inundated with comments about privilege affording her this precious emotional distance. She wasn’t. Same, went the response. Me too.

Unlike the 2016 election results, 2024’s outcome may have disappointed us but didn’t surprise or scandalize us. Along with other so-called vibe shifts, many of us had moved away from hyperventilating online politics. Gone were the heady days of 2017 when Democrats believed resistance to Trump’s regime mandated staying online, monitoring every breach of decorum and meme-ing every outrageous comment. Gone were the days when we couldn’t seem to help collapsing into overidentification with Trump news and related online discourse.

We know better now. Steady immersion in social media, re-posting memes and tweaking takes until they go viral, is not political resistance or even engagement. Often it’s a fool’s game.

Several of my coalescent thoughts about attention and politics were articulated in Ezra Klein’s January 17th podcast conversation with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly. Klein and Hayes discussed how Democrats still seem to believe the type of attention a politician gets is the most important thing, while Republicans now value the volume of attention. While Democrats are still busy raising money and crafting arguments, Republicans are winning with the currency of attention—and the more negative, the better.

Attention is not the full story; there’s no dearth of commentary on other reasons for our 2024 presidential election loss. It is, however, correct that many Dems still believe persuasion wins votes. Republicans are meanwhile winning races by leaving reason and argument in the dust. As Chris Hayes opined to Klein in the podcast, “This is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump’s politics . . . in the attention age, in the war of all against all, getting attention means more than what comes after it [such as persuasion]. And the way to get attention is negative attention.”

If we’re all living in an attention war now, we’d do best to pay less attention to what Trump says, saving our attention for what he actually does, right? That way we can better keep our emotional distance, as my friend said. Preserve our perspective.

Moment of truth: Preserving our perspective

Recognizing the politics of attention and resisting them are two different matters. Enter Saturday Night Live’s cold open this past weekend. In the sketch, leading MSNBC hosts, including Chris Hayes, resolved not to jump on Trump’s crazy comments—and failed miserably.

SNL’s skewering of the network’s obsession with Trump emphasized a couple of points: 1) We can’t rely on mainstream media to sift the important from the incendiary during Trump’s presidency, and 2) It’s pretty damn hard not to take Trump’s bait. I rolled my eyes at the proliferation of smartass Greenland memes after Trump proposed buying the country. I was, however, triggered when he played politics with the LA fires, so incensed that I lost all perspective for a moment.

Yet ignoring Trump news altogether would amount to a dereliction of civic duty for most of us. So how can we responsibly maintain our perspective in the attention wars?

Many friends are reading the classics. The classics’ historical and political depth modulates my friends’ attention and puts our contemporary culture wars in perspective, they say. When you’re absorbing The Odyssey, it’s relatively easy to resist taking hateful digs at Carrie Underwood for performing at Trump’s inauguration.

A couple of friends plan to limit their news exposure to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. Cox Richardson’s near-daily news summaries are grounded in rich historical context—the calm, sober tone of her missives is reassuring enough to make her a kind of Walter Cronkite of the modern age.

Still, many artist friends feel the only way to preserve vision is by checking out. When I asked about news consumption strategies for the next Trump era, a writer friend sent this photo of Andy Warhol napping:

Sam Harris proposed a Buddhist exercise to clarify the direction of our attention: Try to live this year as if we know it will be our last. Not to be morbid, he insists, but as a conceptual frame for more focused living. Asking if I’d pay attention to something if I had only a year to live can be truly illuminating. I’d not waste my insomnia hours, as I did last night, mulling over which 80s and 90s TV shows the series Tracker is trying to evoke.

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Inaugural Inspiration: No Country for Petty People

With only a year to live, I’d definitely ignore Trump’s inauguration, its obsessive coverage, and online reaction. Today I’m focusing on a music research project. I’ll catch a recap of inaugural events later.

Yet I still love this country. It only feels right to remember some inspirational moments from past inaugurations, many of them musical. A few highlights:

In 1977, Jimmy Carter said no thanks to the presidential limo and walked from the Capitol to the White House. The peanut farmer who’d become president was still a man of the people. At Carter’s presidential gala, Linda Ronstadt performed “Crazy”—a reminder that country-pop crossover is nothing new. Rondstadt’s nervous wavering at the song’s start proves she was not lip-synching to a recording; her vulnerability and recovery made for a powerfully intimate performance. I was a preschooler then, too young to watch the inauguration. But all signs must have pointed to Carter’s White House keeping it real.

Fleetwood Mac reunited for the occasion of Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, performing his campaign song “Don’t Stop” at his ball. For me, though, the more memorable performance was Maya Angelou’s recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning,” a study in symbolism and the spoken word. Angelou was only the second poet in history to read a poem at a presidential inauguration. The first was Robert Frost at Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.

Who didn’t perform at Obama’s first inauguration in 2009? Every corner of the entertainment planet leaped at the chance to celebrate his historic victory. Still, we reserve a special place in our hearts for Aretha. That transcendent voice. That transcendent hat bow.

For unity, we may not do better than Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful." Charles sang it for the other side at Reagan’s 1985 inaugural ball. I don’t recall anyone threatening to boycott him.

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Abraham Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses set the bar high for all presidents who followed. The first, in 1961, came at a moment when Lincoln still hoped to avoid civil war:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It didn’t work. Within weeks the Confederate forces were firing on Fort Sumter. That oratory, though: The mystic chords of memory, the better angels of our nature.

I heard echoes of Lincoln’s sentiment this weekend from unlikely quarters: the SNL host monologue by Dave Chappelle. The SNL monologue is about as powerful a platform as legacy media offers these days. Characteristically, Chappelle crossed lines as he dared to find laughter in the LA fires too soon. Gone, however, was Chappelle’s recent bitterness over the excesses of identity politics. Gone was his reactionary militancy in the culture wars. He focused his attention elsewhere and was funny as hell.

Toward the end of a nearly 17-minute monologue, which broke his own SNL record for length, Chappelle turned serious with an anecdote about former President Carter’s 2006 visit to Israel. Chappelle related Carter’s willful insistence on visiting the Palestinian territory despite the danger. Carter may or may not have been a great president, Chappelle said, but he was certainly a great man.

Chappelle’s conclusion was a sincere plea:

The presidency is no place for petty people, so Donald Trump—I know you watch the show—man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you, whether they like you or not. They’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity. And please, have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.

Chappelle made this call after he’d set an example by doing better himself. If the presidency is no place for pettiness, his monologue affirmed, neither is the comedy stage or our own hearts.

His appeal to Trump probably won’t work.

But we can choose to avoid becoming reactionary. We can choose not to become embroiled in the attention wars or the culture wars. We can choose where to direct our attention and with this choice retain both our humanity and the better angels of our nature. God Bless America.