What Balloon Is Frank Rich Living In Anyway?
Christopher Foss
October 26, 2009
The following may at first have you believing I’m a conservative. Actually, I'm abona fide liberal with a bleeding heart just like Frank Rich - or so I thought. Upon reading Frank Rich's Sunday editorial "In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad," (New York Times, October 25), I feel compelled throw open my window like Howard Beale in the movie, Network, and scream: "Stop the bleeding-heart liberal blood-letting!" - except that's it's maddening tongue twister and I have a bit more to say than that.
So my question for general consumption: What balloon is Frank Rich living in anyway? In defending Richard Heene, little Falcon a.k.a. "balloon boy"'s dad, Rich declares the "balloon boy" incident a "reflection of our time"...
Rich insists we have to "look past the sentimental moral absolutes"...and he asks that we muster some sympathy for the devil, in this case the "Bad Dad," Mr. Heene.
Sure, sympathy's one thing, but to blow up the already hyper-inflated Balloon Boy episode to iconic proportions, suggesting the hoax represents an "epitaph of an era" – is quite another...and, worse, I worry about the potential a widely read editorial like his has to galvanize Fox News conservatives who already make a habit of decrying bleeding heart liberalism with annoying regularity. Must we give these fringy types fodder?
Rich twists the proverbial balloon into all sorts of cartoon shapes when he speculates, as follows: "Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled ..."
Rich will occasionally demure: "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,” he states, “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."
First of all, I wonder how accurate it is to portray Heene as a savvy exploiter of a media climate that "obliterates the demarcation between truth and fiction."
But what is one to make of Rich’s core thesis that Balloon Boy Dad is simply part of the fictionalized news media culture we are all complicit in?
Rich discerns a kind of "poignancy in [Heene's] determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream." After all, Heene, a construction worker by trade, had had some difficulty finding work in recent months...(Is there a chance he was too busy appearing on "Wife Swap," the ABC "reality" program and, um, concocting the ornate balloon boy hoax to focus on his usual craft and trade? According to news accounts, Heene spent endless hours with the balloon in his garage).
Rich claims that reality TV programming is "among the country's last dependable job engines" - and so with more than a little inference, Rich is suggesting that Heene was just "at work" when he perpetrated his hoax.
Rich writes: "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."
So my question for general consumption: What balloon is Frank Rich living in anyway? In defending Richard Heene, little Falcon a.k.a. "balloon boy"'s dad, Rich declares the "balloon boy" incident a "reflection of our time"...
Rich insists we have to "look past the sentimental moral absolutes"...and he asks that we muster some sympathy for the devil, in this case the "Bad Dad," Mr. Heene.
Sure, sympathy's one thing, but to blow up the already hyper-inflated Balloon Boy episode to iconic proportions, suggesting the hoax represents an "epitaph of an era" – is quite another...and, worse, I worry about the potential a widely read editorial like his has to galvanize Fox News conservatives who already make a habit of decrying bleeding heart liberalism with annoying regularity. Must we give these fringy types fodder?
Rich twists the proverbial balloon into all sorts of cartoon shapes when he speculates, as follows: "Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled ..."
Rich will occasionally demure: "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,” he states, “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."
First of all, I wonder how accurate it is to portray Heene as a savvy exploiter of a media climate that "obliterates the demarcation between truth and fiction."
But what is one to make of Rich’s core thesis that Balloon Boy Dad is simply part of the fictionalized news media culture we are all complicit in?
Rich discerns a kind of "poignancy in [Heene's] determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream." After all, Heene, a construction worker by trade, had had some difficulty finding work in recent months...(Is there a chance he was too busy appearing on "Wife Swap," the ABC "reality" program and, um, concocting the ornate balloon boy hoax to focus on his usual craft and trade? According to news accounts, Heene spent endless hours with the balloon in his garage).
Rich claims that reality TV programming is "among the country's last dependable job engines" - and so with more than a little inference, Rich is suggesting that Heene was just "at work" when he perpetrated his hoax.
Rich writes: "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."
As Rich might say: What bloviating mush! By any standard, it's a stretch to suggest that Heene's hoax was just show business as usual ...or for that matter the quite to-be-expected behavior of desperate souls trying to cope in these recessionary times.
Rich proceeds to equate Heene’s empty balloon hoax with the toxic financial instruments, "inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt", that helped crater the economy Heene was left to contend with.
Quite a stretch!
For some reason I can’t bring myself to feel that sorry for Heene, and his essentially pathetic behavior. What’s more, in an era of Fox News' Glenn Beck routinely claiming that Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America, I wonder if we really need the spectacle of a liberal commentator bleeding out entirely? Liberal I may be, but I am concerned how casually and casuistically Rich refers to moral absolutes as "sentimental."
The Heene Hoax, may perhaps reveal a few truths about the state of our news-as-entertainment culture, but I'll go out on a limb here and maintain with “sentimental” certainty that the Heene's hoax is totally indefensible.
As I say, what balloon is Frank Rich living in? The New York Times balloon, I'm afraid. While this newspaper still stands for me and other so-called liberals as "the paper of record" - I have never seen a piece in its pages trotting out highfalutin wrong-headedness at this grotesque level.The Heene Hoax, may perhaps reveal a few truths about the state of our news-as-entertainment culture, but I'll go out on a limb here and maintain with “sentimental” certainty that the Heene's hoax is totally indefensible.
The Rich piece which as usual takes up a sizable chunk of the paper's Sunday editorial real estate, betrays a marked bias in his "defense" of Heene, and while it may reflect an understandable desire to factor in broad socio-economic effects that could have played a role in motivating Heene, this sort of slant on the facts does the cause of liberalism – bleeding heart or otherwise – no good at all.
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