Overestimating the fidget factor
I have been thinking about where President Bush got the idea that the American people have the attention spans of 2-year-olds at a birthday party. He seemed oddly confident we wouldn’t notice the illogic of responding to Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks by fighting Iraq. Or the illogic of cutting down the forests to save them, or waging war to ensure peace, or strengthening the United Nations by breaking ranks with it.
The answer to my question began to emerge during a television commercial. Adults in a waiting room are climbing the walls and twisting their bodies into silly poses in desperate efforts to pass the time. What they need, the ad says, is a cell phone with cool video games built in. They’ll never be forced to endure downtime again!
The commercial captures a characterization of modern Americans that has become so generally accepted that we don’t even question it. We are people that, the assumption goes, like lots of fast-moving, shiny things. We must be entertained and occupied at all times.
The assumption shows up everywhere. Car manufacturers push DVD players as the new essential equipment for family trips. CNN and MSNBC cram the television screen with pulsing collages of information: Ticker tapes of news bulletins stream above and below live pictures as newscasters deliver even more news in voiceovers.
Consider what is happening at McDonald’s: Sales of Happy Meals are down. The conclusion is not that people are spending more time eating at home as families, or that parents are declining to stuff their children full of mass-produced fat. No. Industry experts have decided children no longer like the Happy Meal toys.
They say kids today have been raised on action-packed video games, so the plastic McToys aren’t fun anymore. The solution: McDonald’s has begun to install video-game stations in some of its restaurants.
We are, if you believe the marketers, no longer a Prozac Nation but a Ritalin one.
Bush has made a mistake by buying into the assumption. Why? Because it’s wrong.
Americans play video games but we also read, and not just the Bible. We spent more than $10 billion on books last year. Fifty-one percent of shoppers gave books as holiday gifts in December, up from 44 percent in 2001. And independent bookstores have seen rising sales for three years in a row. Yoga is now the hottest thing since Jazzercise. In 1998, 5.7 million people participated in yoga. Last year, the number had climbed to 9.7 million.
Camping, too, is on the rise, an indication that people want simplicity and quiet. The most popular campgrounds in California are already booked for the summer. And yes, we watch reality TV series and Steven Seagal movies, but thoughtful shows like “The West Wing” and movies like “The Hours” have found huge audiences, too.
All of this is bad news for Bush. The implementation of his foreign and domestic policies pretty much hangs on having an easily distracted constituency. Instead, he faces people who in ever-increasing numbers are marching in the first large-scale anti-war demonstrations in 30 years. He faces robust opposition to his flouting of civil and privacy rights and to his proposed tax cuts and his environmental policies.
This nation of mindless fidgets is doing the one thing Bush never counted on: paying attention.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)