Balloon boy: An icon of our age?

It was like a “live, breaking Grimm’s fairy tale,” said Ann Gerhart in The Washington Post. Last week the nation watched “mesmerized and helpless” as a silver, UFO-shaped balloon, supposedly containing 6-year-old boy Falcon Heene, rose thousands of feet above the ground and careened for three hours across the Colorado sky. When the craft finally crashed to earth, said Kathryn Carlson in the Canada National Post, it turned out we were the ones who’d been “taken for a ride.” Falcon was discovered safe at home, where he had apparently been hiding in an attic for fear of being punished for untethering the balloon. Or so his parents claimed. When interviewed on CNN, Falcon mumbled the words “we did this for the show,” and police began asking questions. Now his parents are facing felony charges for sending helicopters, police, and a search team on a wild goose chase, allegedly cooked up to make the Heene family so famous that they’d get their own reality TV series.

This is who we are now, said Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press. Fame has become “the most precious American currency of all.” On reality TV shows every night, we watch “people eat bugs, sing terribly, or throw themselves at strange bachelors to get a piece of celebrity.” The Heenes’ hoax proves only one thing, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “There is nothing at all that some people won’t do to get on television.” Richard Heene, 48, claims to be an amateur scientist, but he’s actually a trained actor who got his wife, Mayumi, and their kids on the reality show Wife Swap. Recently, he’s been frantically pitching numerous reality shows featuring his family to networks and producers.

In fairness to Heene, said Mary Williams in Salon.com, we’re still coming out of a pretty nasty recession, with unemployment at near-Depression levels. Heene suffered from “the crazy, frequently delusional, and often downright dangerous dream of easy, big money.” For some people, that dream takes the form of the lottery. For Heene, it apparently led to a hoax that would turn him and his family into celebrities. In that sad obsession, said the New York Daily News in an editorial, Heene has plenty of company, including the “Bridezillas” and the “Real Housewives” of pretty much every city in America. For these poor, fame-addled souls, “even when cameras are not inside their homes, it seems, they are inside their heads.”

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