When The Balloon Pops

Commentary by Lightning Rod - RIP 2/6/2013
Forum rules
To honor our site members who are no longer with us.
Post Reply
User avatar
Lightning Rod
Posts: 5211
Joined: August 15th, 2004, 6:57 pm
Location: between my ears
Contact:

When The Balloon Pops

Post by Lightning Rod » October 20th, 2009, 10:52 am

Image

When The Balloon Pops
for release 09-20--09
Dallas, Texas
by Lightning Rod

It's hard to tell the difference between high comedy and tragedy in our media mash modern world which was swept off its feet this week with the Saga of Falcon the Balloon Boy and his mad scientist father.

This adorably telegenic story started out as Leave It to Beaver but quickly turned into CSI, I suppose it is naive to assume a difference between news and entertainment, but this story has made a tear of sadness appear in The Poet's Eye. It says something very bleak about our media dazzled world.

It all began with the visual spectacle created by the arial shots of some ungainly spacecraft soaring out from the Rockies toward the great American plains on a beautiful day. We were intrigued by the pictures before we knew a thing about the story. Then they add danger. This is an 'experimental' hot air balloon we are told and there is a boy inside. The suspense builds. The officials are taking control; the experts start popping up on the cable news shows. This was the perfect story for an audience yawning in the doldrums of endless yammer about healthcare reform. It had all the most thrilling aspects of an Amber Alert and a UFO chase rolled into one.

As the story played out over the afternoon it looked perfectly like the pilot for a television series. The balloon comes down before we can lose interest and we discover that the aircraft is empty. Has the boy vanished? The rescuers fan out and we all wonder what kind of grease spot that a six year old kid would make after being dropped from 4000 ft. Then just after the final commercial break the kid is found and there is resolution and closure complete with tears and joy; roll the credits.

In other times that would have been the end of the story, warm and fuzzy. But these are the days of the 24 hr. cable news cycle and the nonstop buzz and feedback of the internet. When young Falcon, in a family interview with Wolf Blitzer, innocently announced that his little game of hide and seek was 'for the show' the world wide web went crazy with skepticism. This lit a fire under the police department. They seized computers and put a timeline together and used classic TV interrogation techniques and discovered that the quirky but lovable family was selling a hoax. They were frauds and the authorities and the media and the public had all been hoodwinked. Nobody likes to be fooled. We started to hear ugly talk of federal charges and 'where are we gonna put the kids?' and 'who is going to pay for this publicity stunt?'

We have had hoaxes since Eve sold the apple. Nothing puts a gleam in The Poet's Eye quicker than a good hoax. The Christian resurrection hoax was a doozie. The Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness monster give me a giggle. I loved the Clifford Irving Howard Hughes biography. Recently it was announced that Taco Bell had purchased the Liberty Bell for naming rights. Hoaxes are here to keep us on our toes and to remind us of the ultimately illusory nature of our universe.

What makes me sad is that in a world of hoaxes we focus on this relatively harmless one. It's sad that we have devised a culture in which being on a reality show is a symbol of prestige and success, a measure of validity. It appears that the Heene family is succeeding beyond their wildest expectations. The exposure of the hoax along with the attendant public scourging of the miscreants will be bigger news than the hoax itself.

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly we can fly--Fifth Dimension
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."

The Poet's Eye

User avatar
Doreen Peri
Site Admin
Posts: 14532
Joined: July 10th, 2004, 3:30 pm
Location: Virginia
Contact:

Post by Doreen Peri » October 20th, 2009, 11:53 am

Fine writing here! Nice to see you back!

Bet you they get their own TV show after they pay their fines and do their weekend in jail. ;)

That would be "A sign of the times" - as Nightline calls it.

Sad, yes.

User avatar
stilltrucking
Posts: 20605
Joined: October 24th, 2004, 12:29 pm
Location: Oz or somepLace like Kansas

Post by stilltrucking » October 25th, 2009, 8:07 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opini ... .html?_r=1
Op-Ed Columnist
In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad

FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine

Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.

Or such are the received lessons of this tale.

Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.

It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.

It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.

In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)

Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day — “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.

The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ’em eat fame.

If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.

Post Reply

Return to “The Poet's Eye by Lightning Rod”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests