Oh my aching A.D.D.

Phoenix, AZ

I was reading a short story one day and discovered, at the age of 50, that I am ADD. The story contained a very concise description of Attention Deficit Disorder-sufferers lack the ability to concentrate on anything that bores them. Putting it that way, I totally identify. The story went on to point out that those who had the condition prior to its identification and subsequent pharmacological treatment regimens developed ways to compensate on their own. As I was sharing this revelation with my somewhat skeptical husband–are you bored? Always. Always?–I had the epiphany that I too had developed a compensatory behavior, to wit, I experience OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). To that disclosure my husband’s eyes widened and he muttered his own epiphanic “yes.”

I love reading essays and short stories. They are just long enough that they do not bore me. I despise fiction as a reading medium. I fail to see the point of investing that much of my precious lifetime in someone else’s fantasy. I stick to non-fiction and even then usually make it only about 3/4 of the way through a book before boredom looms. But I never lack for structure in my reading list. I discovered that in 1915 The Best American Short Stories series appeared for the first time and has been appearing every year since. So I have made it my business to read every single edition. The other artificial rule I concocted in order to increase the interest level in the project is that I forbid myself from reading stories in current publications. The rationale behind this is why waste my time when I can just wait until someone else has culled out all the best and compiled them for me. If that isn’t OCD, well.....

While thinking about this, as a lawyer of course the first thing I sought to do was find an apt analogy to support my analysis. Somehow it makes a theory more convincing if you can match it up to something totally unrelated. I was never that great at coming up with analogies, realizing now that it must be too boring. But it was a matter of minutes when I realized I am merely a microcosm of the state of the businesses of the mass media in modern America.

My husband, a journalist, has been schlepping home of late with tales from the news battlefield’s business side. It seems newspapers are all in a panic about how to remain profitable in a digital world. They are trying to find a way to stay relevant to the young people even while they are trying to stay loyal to the old guard who have a nostalgic, if not practical, attachment to their product. While it is true that coverage of the news has changed dramatically-becoming like me ADD and OCD–as a somewhat informed but uninvolved observer, it seems to me that the mass media has made the youth this way. This puts the entire country in peril-sort of like what is happening in my own professional career.

Take for example the coverage of any story. News breaks, whether it is Anna Nichol sneezing or President Bush misarticulating. Someone seizes on it and runs an item on the TV scrawl line. Everyone else in the entire journalism universe, who are presumably sitting at their desks completely bored with their beat assignments, grabs on to this new story and in an effort to maintain their own interest in it makes it their project to analyze ever other word written on it and rearrange the letters of each sentence in a sort of anagrammatic story of their own. Clearly ADD with compensating OCD. Meanwhile the rest of us are just sort of stuck in the muck.

The first quarter of 2007 Bush Administration news provides ample evidence that this ADD/OCD may in fact be an epidemic in our society. Nearly every week a story breaks that spreads like wildfire and generates untold inches of pontification and opining by nearly every citizen with a computer and any inclination to use the internet to conduct their own “research” and impart their wisdom via blogs and newspapers and TV and radio talk shows. In short, they beat the horse well after it is dead with sheer volume. But soon they become bored again and move on to the next thing. The Iraq surge strategy, the Libby trial, immigration, Anna Nicole (oops, how did that get in the BA list?), the US Attorney purge, the Libby conviction, you get the picture. The ADD journalists grab on to the next big thing, but it quickly becomes boring because everyone is doing it so they obsess about their own contribution churning out ever more clever ways to say the same thing without doing any real thinking or fact finding because they know there will be no time as the impending boredom will drive them right on to the next big thing.

For the average member of the public this constant churning of the same stories over and over creates boredom. That boredom is compensated for by giving in and becoming absorbed with the selected details we are fed. Because political issues are necessarily filled with minutiae and nuance, the average person just latches on to the Anna Nicole news as they are not about to invest the time it takes to understand a complex issue. Doing so would run the risk of missing out on the next big thing. Like the fictional lemmings they are dragging us right off the cliff into a world where no one knows how to really pay attention.

The front page of today’s paper includes a story of how scientists are working to find ways to help students concentrate on one thing at a time. I remember being appalled at back to school night at my daughter’s prestigious catholic prep school that watching TV while studying is a norm and should not be viewed as a problem; these kids are used to it, that is what they do. This from the same nuns who send you to detention for asking why you got a B in textiles-a class where it is almost impossible not to get an A. I am pretty darn good at multitasking but find it hard to believe I could grasp those physics theories while watching the Gilmore Girls. Who knows, maybe evolution has sped up and my child’s brain has divided like a paramecium with one for fun and one for school. But I kind of doubt it.

So, why does any of this matter? As we become more and more addicted to the next big thing, we are failing miserably at solving the problems that are rehashed in this concentrated period and abandoned when replaced by the next issue. No one has a clue how to solve the Iraq conundrum, no one has a clue how to solve the public education problem (except those nuns), no one has a clue how to solve the immigration problem, if it is indeed one; the list is endless. We hear ample criticism of these messes but never any recommended solutions. When the time comes for that we have already moved on to the next big thing. Somehow we need to compensate for this ADD by refocusing the concommitant OCD on solutions rather than horse beating.

Oh, yeah, and in the process maybe we would stop obsessing over word choice and concentrate on the important part-the bigger picture. I know McCain used the phrase “tar baby” last week but I’ll be dogged if I can recall what the context was. I guess I was not bored enough to obsess over finding out.