The idea of 500 television channels challenges even veteran couch potatoes. Channel grazing, the hot new indoor sport testing how short attention spans can get, has honed the skills of millions in the fine art of finger flicking.
But 500 channels instead of the usual 50 would send the dedicated remote jockey into uncharted territory, to the twilight zone of utter mindlessness, where no human of sane pretension should ever venture.
It would seem the finger cannot flick fast enough in an hour to allow morsel-by-morsel tasting of such a visual feast, much less digestion of even a smidgen of the information on each channel.
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But one forgets this is America, the land of discovery where people seek and conquer new frontiers each day. One should never dismiss lightly the inventiveness of a people who settled an untamed country with incomparable wit and courage.
Perhaps we are nowhere close to reaching the limit of how much information people can absorb and evaluate in a given minute or second. The technological adventurers of America, sitting in front of their TV sets, will surely try to push that envelope to its outer edge.
To appreciate the channel-grazers’ task of flicking through the content of 500 channels, one should consider the task confronting President-elect Bill Clinton. No president of modern times has encountered so many complex problems that must be addressed in such a short period of time.
Somalia, Bosnia, Russia, China. Nuclear proliferation and the arming of small, dangerous regimes. Saddam Hussein and Middle Eastern oil. The growing threat of Iran. The Arab-Israeli conflict over land. The splintering alliance that fought the Cold War, with huge implications for the future of the U.S. economy.
The drug war. The free trade agreement with Mexico and its potential threat to American manufacturing jobs. The massive budget deficit and federal debt. The daunting task of converting the U.S. military to a peacetime footing. An economy that is not producing enough good jobs. The health-care crisis, the AIDS crisis, the crisis in the central cities. Racism, opportunity and the glass ceiling.
This does not even take into account the complexities of relationships he must contend with in his job-how to balance off one group against another, manage the diversity in his own Cabinet and push his program through a Congress composed of 535 individual members without its becoming a Christmas tree of special interest.
A more comprehensive accounting can probably get you up to 500 separate items of presidential concern. Let us assume the president gave each one an equal amount of time in a 12-hour day, something that would never happen because some problems deserve more attention than others. That would allow him only 1 minute, 26 seconds with each problem, allowing no time for anything else in his life.
Those who have observed President Bush in the last four years might have noticed how he seemed crestfallen, even depressed. Even the president once remarked upon it, to deny that it was true.
More likely, he was preoccupied with the rising complexity of the job and the speed of change throughout the world.
The telling sign was when he glanced at his watch during the second debate, as if to say there are more important things to do than this.
But this was not disinterest, as widely reported. It was, undoubtedly the odd malady reported by some addicted to channel-grazing: the anxiety one feels from witnessing so much, irrelevant or no, and the overwhelming compulsion to get back to it.
Bush lost the presidency because he could not deal with all the matters that demanded his attention in a manner that satisfied him. By the time he had flicked through this favorite foreign-policy channels, so to speak, there was no time left over for the domestic-economy channels.
Information management is a huge presidential problem, but Clinton may be better equipped to handle it. He grew up in the information age and knows that it can overwhelm a president if it is not soaked up as part of some overall perspective.
For example, there is pressure on Clinton from opinion leaders in the capital to consider devoting more time to foreign policy and the number of problems that seemingly mushroomed in the last year. They’ve divided up the world in intellectual boxes here, with foreign policy and power politics put in one and economic policy in another.
This is a trap. They’re all in the same box, and always have been, even more so now that the Cold War is over. Foreign policy can be digested and understood through an economic lens, and dealt with in similar fashion. “The economy, stupid” was a great campaign slogan. It is even a better context for sorting out the growing list of problems that Clinton will confront.
Clinton would help himself deal with these problems if he resisted his temptation to please all sides and came quickly to grips with the central problem of the presidency, the hard choices involved in cutting the budget deficit.
Letting it fester will only worsen those 499 other closely connected problems. A president who wants to deal with information overload perhaps should put the clicker aside and stay tuned to the economic channel.