Can Consumer Nation change its attitude?

ROSS TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — The first thing you see is the enormous boot.

Atop a ridge north of Pittsburgh, towering over customers at the entrance to Ross Park Mall, the giant L.L. Bean boot seems to shout: No buy is too big, no shopping dream too outsized. Come on in. Retail nirvana awaits. “Please do not climb on the boot,” says a sign, as if we all might.

Inside, along buffed corridors freshly retooled to ramp up the aura of luxury, storefront signs spin a tale of a culture in conflict. “More choices coming soon,” says a store under construction. “Unmounted Diamond Event,” trumpets Littman Jewelers.

Yet selected items at Ann Taylor and Morini are 60 percent off. Le Gourmet Chef exhorts everyone to “Buy More $ave More” — a truth and a paradox that distills America into a bumper-sticker slogan. And just past the front door is the place that touts “Great Deals Inside.” That would be Citizens Bank.

These are the contradictions that confront 21st-century America. We love to shop, but we need to save. We want it all, and we want it now. No matter whether it’s a new pair of $100 jeans on your Visa, 90 days same as cash on that new car, a subprime mortgage. Psychologically, they’re of a piece: Buy now, pay later. Shop till you drop.

Now we’re paying. Now we’re dropping. Credit — personal and institutional and national — is overextended into the absurd. Money that didn’t exist in the first place is now frighteningly, heartbreakingly real. And the temples of our consumer choice are starting to crumble.

Chrysler and General Motors are wondering aloud if their century-old tanks are empty. Starbucks, home of the $4 venti latte, is laying off thousands and has — et tu, Brute? — launched a cheap brand of instant coffee. Circuit City expired two weeks ago, leaving 567 stores dark and Best Buy as the main place to shop for the 60-inch flat-screen HDTV you can’t afford.

This is economic crisis. And in Washington and on Wall Street, they’re scrambling to fix it with economic cures — useful ones or misguided ones, depending upon your perspective.

But however effective they are, they remain attempts to impose a financial solution upon a dilemma that, in many ways, is cultural and behavioral.

Because in America, we consume. It is what we do, what we have been told to do, what our government usually tells us to do, what we love to do and what we must do.

It has built us into a behemoth and undercut us at inopportune moments. Viewed from a distance, it’s easy to see us as a nation of economic 5-year-olds, spending our allowance before we get it and demanding more, more, more, then being shocked when the money runs out.

Well, our revels now are ended. And at the edges of any economic recovery that might lie ahead lurks a question that few seem inclined to contemplate: At the dawn of the administration that swore it would bring change to us, can we bring change to ourselves?

The Jan. 29 White House daily briefing offered a telling moment when the question of what to do with federal stimulus money came up.

“The point of an economic stimulus plan,” presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “is to get money into people’s hands and into people’s pockets so that they use their hand to reach in their pocket and spend that money.”

But wait, someone said. Hold on. What about savings? Wasn’t it the nationwide lack of savings and overextension of credit — institutional and personal — that got us into this mess? Gibbs was quick and emphatic: “I’m not discouraging savings,” he said.

And therein lies the tension. It’s like the old Warner Bros. cartoons in which Daffy Duck or some other character has miniature versions of himself on his shoulder — one a gentle angel, the other a pitchfork-wielding devil — giving him polar opposite accounts of what to do next. Shop? Save? Shop more?

The conundrum of America has long been thus — thrift and parsimony vs. capitalism and acquisition. Both are virtues. One is seen as small-town and heartland, and thus appealing. The other, on an institutional level, elevated America into an economic giant and, on a personal level, made us a nation of debtors with really cool toys and houses we can’t pay for.

They can seem irreconcilable. Even as Calvin Coolidge was cautioning that “thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character,” John Maynard Keynes was insisting that “the engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.”

Is it any wonder we’re confused?

Slowly, though, signs are emerging that suggest the recent months of economic free fall and attendant angst have gotten our attention.

Luxury shopping — goods bought at places such as Coach and Neiman Marcus — was down 19.2 percent in February from a year ago, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. And an AP/GfK poll last month showed that 65 percent of Americans questioned worried about whether they’d be able to pay their bills.

“Mentally, it’s already changing. We always wondered, what were they like, those people of the Great Depression — how did they learn how to save? And now we’re becoming like them,” says Amity Shlaes, author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.”

Tod Porter, who heads the economics department at Youngstown State University, sees us struggling through the cloudy waters of what economists call “the paradox of thrift.” In this model, savings operates like a daily multivitamin. In sensible doses, it is a virtue that fosters stability and keeps the system strong. But in excess, it can be poisonous to the system by reducing the demand for goods and services — and making bad recessions worse.

For the moment, though, we are reaping the aftereffects of not taking our vitamins. The system is broken, and many of the vandals are, in fact, us.

“It was like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff, and for a while he doesn’t realize there’s nothing underneath him. And that can only last so long,” Porter says. His voice trails off, and he poses a question.

“At what point does everybody realize the game is up?”