A clumsy demonstration of walking while texting on morning television shows that we've surpassed England in utter ignorance of our own silliness
I happened to be switching through channels about a week ago when I somehow got stuck on the Today Show. This NBC stalwart of the media world has been around since I was just a young'un, and while it has waxed and waned in quality over the years (Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb and Matt Lauer cannot make up for the absence of Jane Pauley as far as I'm concerned) it has remained a familiar part of the television landscape of the bleary-eyed viewer who wants a little light news before heading out the door to face the day.
So, utterly disenthralled by my television viewing alternatives, I lazily dropped the remote and watched the now-common trope of scaring the American stay-at-home moms with yet another "what stupid thing are your teenagers doing now when you're not looking" story. On occasion, these can be mildly entertaining to those of us who are satisfied with our decisions to not have children, and they can seem pretty silly to a generation that grew up with nightmarish playground hazards like orthopedic ward-subsidizing jungle gyms, sun-baked buttock-burning steel slides, and see-saws to serve as toddler catapults with the proper asymmetric weight distribution. Some of those kids have probably just started to re-enter the atmosphere due to orbital decay.
But hey, they need to get ratings like everyone else in the ruthless cutthroat world of shiny happy morning television. So I normally don't much notice. But this morning was different. This morning was a real turning point in American history, for me at least.
The latest parent-baiting story was about "texting while walking". I'm from a generation that had to learn to prioritize watching where we were going, so this seemed more like a way of culling the mentally weaker members from the herd than a major social problem. This may be wishful thinking on my part, however, and we may be headed towards an impending apocalypse wherein most of humanity dies from walking off of cliffs, into open manholes, or in front of moving vehicles due to their bizarre need to distract themselves from exercising basic motor skills with the latest selfie pics from the Kardashians' Twitter feed.
In order to demonstrate this, the Today reporters had one of their number line up on a street, surrounded by the usual gang of Today Show bystanders desperate to get a shout-out on TV while holding up glitter-streaked cardboard signs, and actually try to walk an obstacle course while texting on a cellphone. The obstacle course consisted of some magenta-colored traffic cones about four inches high (how CUTE!) lined up one both sides of this narrow space with plastic tape strung between them. The objective was for the texting woman to walk over these tiny flea-circus accessories so as to not break the tape, which she was of course unable to do.
By this point in the program, however, I was laughing so hard I had to stop watching. It was, for all intents and purposes, a twenty-first century update of the Twit of the Year Awards.
Twit of the Year is one of those Comedy 101 sketches from Monty Python, back in late Sixties, where a group of hooting, well-dressed upper-crust idiots in bowler hats with terrible overbites and names like Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith and Oliver St. John-Mollusk had to run over a course featuring things like a three-inch wall of matchboxes, which only some of them could overcome ("Oliver's having a bit of trouble with his old brain injury, he's going to have a go, no, bad luck, he doesn't know when he's beaten, he doesn't know when he's winning, he has no sort of sensory apparatus") and which finally ended when all of the twits had to shoot themselves. It remains today one of the funniest sketches for any Monty Python fan.
Now, it seems we have come full circle. What was once sketch comedy lampooing the British class system has now become a public service announcement to American masses who can't seem to keep from being distracted from the critical task of putting one foot in front of the other and looking both ways before crossing the street, all so that they can perform typing tasks on devices engineered for voice communication.
Oh well. At least now I can cut back on my cable bill. With the prospect of well-dressed, well-educated, tech-savvy texting-obsessed young professionals walking into traffic and tripping over small obstacles on sidewalks, slapstick physical humor is well on its way to becoming our daily norm. Who needs Comedy Central anymore?