I knew it...I knew it...!
Knew that last month's 'balloon boy' escapade was a hoax, even before the Colorado authorities.
From the moment live images of a giant, half-deflated silver helium balloon touching down in an amber colored field, some 'official' running toward it hysterically, got me to stop on CNN (after a spate of fruitless channel surfing, during which neither Bobby Flay nor Brady was capturing my interest) and watch wide-eyed, eager to see if there really was a 'six-year-old boy' inside, I had my doubts. Where would the boy be, I thought.There's no basket, there's no apparent way in or out of the vessel...
I might not have given my skepticism a second thought had the CNN anchorwoman not expressed out loud the exact same sentiment, almost in tandem. Her doubt seemed to rise, somewhat unconsciously, out of her carefully sculpted, professional interest in the story:
"I don't really see where a little boy could be..."
And I found myself chuckling, thinking, Well, if he IS in there, he's going to come out sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk.
I would never have been so glib about something so potentially tragic, even privately, if it hadn't seemed...right from the start...so unreal.
But it was unreal. Last week, the child's father, Richard Heene, pled guilty to a felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant and will likely be going to jail for a while.
Yup...I so knew!
Not that I'm anything special. It would seem to have been difficult, if not downright impossible, for anyone following the story to miss the strangeness of the Heene family from the get-go - the father's absurdly overwrought expressions and odd choice of words coupled in unnerving contrast with the mother's persistant silence, letting her husband do all the talking, as if determined to do so. Then there were the children, the three of them trotted out with the parents at every photo opportunity as if all were thought to have been in the wayward balloon, and little Falcon (uh, yeah...about that...) - the boy of the hour, back safely in his parents' loving arms - squirming, yawning, pooping and vomiting his way through national interviews, and inadvertently (because nearly everything a six-year-old does is inadvertent) spilling the beans on Larry King Live by claiming the family 'did this for a show'...
It was clear from the father's reaction he knew the jig was all but up, and he took out his frustration over this unanticipated wrinkle by getting huffy with Wolf Blitzer. From this, and the unsettling reocognition that if it hadn't been a hoax it probably would have turned out tragically, it was not hard to notice that something smelled funny...
And it wasn't coming from Falcon.
Falcon and his siblings, of course, are innocent. The parents are the idiots, and since have been suitably (to my taste, anyway) skewered in the media for their hijinks. In fairness, it's become clear the father was the true culprit, the 'mastermind' behind the whole thing, sans any reverence that word might imply. He and his family had appeared on reality shows in the past, and Richard was hoping to trade on whatever notoriety and name recognition this stunt provided to negotiate his own show.
Jesus...imagine what might have transpired if little Falcon had not blurted out the truth on national television! Imagine the mind-numbingly stupid 'reality show' (an oxymoron if ever there were one) that might have resulted, the idiotic plot-lines we would have been expected to follow...to consider entertainment! Imagine the whole thing going the way Richard Heene envisioned: talent agents contacting him after the incident, offering their services, the good folks at TLC (seriously, does anything get 'learned' as much as exploited on 'The Learning Channel'?) placing their calls, interested in a development deal. Imagine more than one network getting in on some bidding war and putting Richard Heene in the driver's seat of his piecemeal 'reality' career.
I get queasy thinking about it: some three-season, six-figure deal might have been signed, then, a year later, a much-promoted series premiere flickering onto our television screens, with some lamely contrived title, a la Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or Leave it to Lamas (what the hell is that?! Seriously, I thought Lorenzo Lamas died on the set of Renegade in 1995!), forever cementing the Heene clan in our national consciousness.
And that would really be the crime, wouldn't it? Imagine, were it not for little Falcon's world-saving candor, we might soon have been talking about the Heenes the way we now speak of Jon and Kate....yes, that's right, Jon and Kate...no last name necessary. No need to refer to their show's title to establish whom I'm speaking of...just Jon and Kate, like a married couple you have drinks with on Friday night: they could live next door, you could have play dates for your kids on Saturday morning, catch a game on Sunday. We all feel an unwarranted sense of familiarity with the Gosselins now, resulting from the unwarranted emotional reaction viewers felt when things went wrong in their marriage last spring. Even those of us who'd never watched the show, who only know what a 'Jon and Kate' is through blaring tabloid headlines that happen to catch our attention while we're standing in line to buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's, or Ryan Seacrest's teeth chattering about them on an E! news update, or Joel McHale making fun of Kate's haircut....even we are sentenced to forever knowing who these people are; no joke, as we know who Neil Armstrong was, or Dan Marino, say....Lincoln, Sinatra, Travolta, Clinton, whoever...we now know the name Gosselin.
Sigh...
So too could have been the case with the name Heene. They might have become just Dick and Mayumi....
America owes Falcon Heene a debt of gratitude! God bless that little boy! Not since the Cuban missile crisis has this country swung so close to all-out destruction! The Heenes night have...good lord...become part of what we remember about these times!
And yet, the sad truth is Richard Heene already is. It might be possible to find some sympathy for him, actually, to regard him as a victim. He is, after all, just a sad practitioner of the modern American dream: getting as much as possible with as little as possible, usually through a dysfunctional 'look at me! look at me!' stab at exposure. The 'qualifications' for reality stardom cannot possibly be more debased. Given VH-1's seemingly endless skank parade, and TLC's seemingly relentless (and ruthless) quest for ethical aberrations and physical deformities to exploit, why shouldn't Richard Heene want to grab his piece of the (cow) pie, or think he has a reason/right to?
He is essentially as 'qualified' as any of them.
The moral of the story: If you can, for whatever reason - being freakishly talented or decidedly UN-talented, cute but stupid, ugly and stupid, deformed, ignorant or obnoxious - help sell more cases of beer, bags of Doritos and booty-licious cell phones, you can find fame in 21st century America.
