We're driven to distraction - and we've thrown away the keys
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, October 20, 2005

As my deadline came and went without so much as a paragraph filed from me, my editor became increasingly agitated, until she finally walked over and asked flat-out where my column was.

``Sorry,'' I said, ``but writing's a distraction.`

``Oh,'' she said, looking flustered, ``I'm sorry to have bothered you.''

I put my feet up on my desk, and whispered a heartfelt thank-you to my mentors in Washington. Say what you will about the Bush administration and its various officials/best-pals-from-college, but you've got to admire the genius of the excuse du jour: distraction.

As in: Michael Brown leaving his position at FEMA because he didn't want to become ``a distraction.'' Not because he had messed up - heaven forbid - but because he didn't want to distract the country from the important rescue work that, come to think of it, he should have been doing.

As in: not releasing Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' papers from her White House years, because doing so would be, in the words of President Bush, ``a distraction from whether or not she will be a good judge.'' Yeah, why let actual background information about her distract us from finding out what she's really like?

We Americans love nothing more than distractions. We spend every free second we have, and some not so free, looking for them, hunting them down. At work, we sneak time on the Internet to play video games. At night, we watch ``Desperate Houswives'' not ``The NewsHour'' with Jim Lehrer on PBS. We watch DVDs while we're driving.

If we were being honest with ourselves, our motto would be: One Nation, Under God, With Liberty and Wait, Go Back To That Channel, That Looks Interesting.

At least ``distraction'' is better than the previous pet excuse, in which embattled executives left their posts to ``spend more time with (my) family.''

Never mind whether their families wanted to spend more time with them, it provided cover on the way out of town, ahead of the auditors.

I know there are plenty of other examples of the ``distraction'' excuse. Lots of them. But researching their use, well, that would be a distraction.