(MONEY Magazine) – Picture this: First, a Maria Bartiromo stand-up outside the Fed. Mark Haines follows by grilling the City of Tulsa Comptroller on whether a new transfer station will speed up the rate at which trash reaches the municipal landfill. Cut to Joe Kernen telling us that yet another study points to faulty assumptions about the basket of goods that make up the consumer price index.

Sound awful? That's because when we say we've become a nation of investors, what we really mean is that we've become a nation of stock investors. CNBC and the magazines that chronicled late-'90s investment mania are almost entirely about stocks; 401(k) portfolios have blossomed thanks to stocks; workplace compensation has changed because of stock options. Now the economy appears to be slowing, and while nobody's suggesting we abandon stocks altogether, it's increasingly looking as though bonds deserve more attention than they've recently received.

But I'm not sure we really want them to get it. Bonds just don't generate the kind of buzz that stocks do. They have almost no celebrity value. You can get a good vibe about Steve Jobs and root for Apple; but who gets a warm fuzzy about their state treasurer? Fixed-income vehicles are also hard to daydream about: Neophyte stock investors dream of "10 baggers" that they sell for 10 times what they paid. Bond prices, meanwhile, fluctuate by basis points--hundredths of a percentage point. And investment-grade bonds rarely generate stories the way stocks do. Occasionally you will see a major scandal, but, as Yale finance professor Will Goetzmann points out, the news that is most relevant to bondholders--interest-rate changes--affects all bonds (at least all those in the same class) pretty much equally.

Maybe we should just accept that, in our heart of hearts, some of us are more interested in entertainment than enrichment. If you disagree, imagine David Faber detailing, say, the cost of hospital construction in Philadelphia. Good-bye, broadband; hello, bedpans? It might cost me some basis points, but I'll pass.

--ALEC APPELBAUM