Balloonatics

I hate personal interest stories.

If a celebrity dies or a bizarre story pops up you can be sure you will hear about it on every new program on every channel and it will linger on for days. The problem with these personal interest stories are that they don't give you information that is useful to you. If Congress is voting on a bill or the President is giving speeches about an issue, it may eventually affect you. As an informed citizen, you might feel the need to learn about that issue and either support or oppose it.

News programs defend their decision to run these stories, saying that they get high ratings. Although everyone complains about hearing about Michael Jackson every night for a month, they still watch. It draws in not only the regular watchers but also the lookie-loos who's closest brush with news is paging through the Enquirer at the grocery store checkout line.

The latest of these personal interest stories is "Balloon Boy". Unless you've been living under a rock you already know the general story. Homemade balloon flies away, boy is supposedly inside and flying thousands of feet in the air, balloon lands, kid is not inside, kid was hiding in attic all along. And then there was the breaking news that the parents knew all along that the kid was not in the balloon and that they had actually planned this as a stunt to get a reality TV show.

The balloon boy even threw up on national TV during the debacle. The Heene family's neighbors, who comforted them while the balloon was in the air, are reportedly furious about the deception. When police seized the Heene's computer they found two theme songs Heene had recorded for his new potential reality shows:

"When you want to learn the mysteries of how things work
Weather, the planets, the whole universe.
Tune into the show, that's really effective
Watch Richard Heene -- Science Detective!"

"If you need it built or fixed,
There's just one man to pick ...
That's Richard Heene ... contractor!"

Apparently Richard Heene thought that "losing" his son temporarily in a hot air balloon was enough to make him a "Science Detective." One wonders what the son would have had to endure to give his father bona fides to be a contractor.

Maybe there is an important story buried among this nonsense. People are willing to date Flavor Flav, eat horse testicles, and be stranded on a desert island all for the privilege of being marginally famous. Now it seems people are willing to train their children to lie to Wolf Blitzer, throw up on live TV, and alienate their neighbors for the chance to be marginally infamous. One is just foolish and the other is obviously over the line. But they are not borne of different desires, they are only differentiated by magnitude.

America needs to remember that fame did not solve the problems of Freddie Prinze, Jim Morrison, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain. Lasting happiness must be found in our occupations, families and friends. When pursuit of fleeting acknowledgment puts those things in risk, one has truly lost his way.