Ain’t that America: The balloon boy, his nation of watchers and a unique cultural moment

Ain’t that America: balloon boy’s cultural moment

“Those who will come after us will be as wise as we are, and as able to take care of themselves as we have been,” Thomas Jefferson said in 1811.

Let us say, for argument’s sake, that Jefferson is returned to Earth fleetingly to check in on his beloved United States. Let’s say that we must tell him what became of the nation whose birth he masterminded. And — one final leap of faith — let’s say that the day he reappears happens to be today.

Jefferson’s state-of-the-union snapshot might include health care. It might include the economy and Iraq. But how could it exclude the one event that serves up a stunningly multifaceted window into America exactly 200 years after he left the presidency?

Said event being, of course, the Balloon Boy Saga.

Rarely are we given such an opportunity to press pause and take stock of the American experience as it is unfolding in our moment in history. And almost never does a single event so starkly illuminate the constantly shifting sands of who we are as a nation, which may, right now, be this:

We have become so enamored with the spectacle that, sometimes, we risk confusing it with real life.

“This thing has become so convoluted,” one observer concluded. That the observer was Richard Heene, the father at the epicenter of it all, made the statement no less true.

Think about it. Pretty much everything in the ravenous modern American pop-culture pantheon is present and accounted for.

The imperiled child and the Gosselin-style parental unraveling. The marketing of your story to the world. The hangers-on, jockeying for a sliver of limelight. The eagerness — no, desperation — to take a shortcut to stardom through storm-chasing and reality television. The near-instant journey from victim to celebrity to villain.

There’s more. Cable news, amplifying a local curiosity into a national nail-biting moment that unfolded in real time. The emergence of shaky home video. The expectation that little Falcon Heene would make the rounds of the national talk-show rounds, because that’s simply what Americans do when something big happens to them.

And finally, the balloon-borne saga echoes another enduring American archetype — the fraudulent but colorful Wizard of Oz, the embodiment of a snake-oil tradition that reaches back to P.T. Barnum.

People grappled to characterize the moment using American tools, from sarcasm to souvenirs. “American news at its best,” documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock said. “Own a piece of history!” shouted the Web site hawking Balloon Boy T-shirts. And this, from 6-year-old Falcon Heene himself, a statement we’re still sorting out: “You guys said that we did it for the show.”

Weird, weirder, weirdest. What do you expect, though, in a land where, when people speak about the disaster/car chase/crime they’ve just seen, they say, simply: “It was just like a movie.” And much of the time, they’re thrilled to make the comparison.

“It may have been a grab for attention, but people were happy to take a look at it — perhaps to distract from the real business that we’re supposed to be getting down to here, health care and everything else,” says Emily Godbey, an Iowa State University scholar who studies how America gawks and rubbernecks at spectacle.

Barnum’s famed hoaxes, showcased in his touring 19th-century “American Museum,” were whoppers for sure. Yet many of the Americans who shelled out their shillings to enter the tent suspected, or outright knew, that they were being fed a put-on. They didn’t mind; it was part of the fun. (Barnum, incidentally, was no stranger to making money off hot-air balloon rides.)

And what of Falcon himself, in the eye of the media storm that has carried off his family’s home with the force of Dorothy’s cyclone?

He looks at turns sad, bewildered, playful, taciturn — all the unrestrained emotions you’d expect to appear on the face of any 6-year-old boy whose life has been upended. What was once the purview of the world’s Shirley Temples and Jackie Coogans is now available to anyone who can command the news cycle.

“I don’t understand them thinking that this is good parenting — put a bunch of lights in the living room and expose this kid to all of this attention,” says Ada Calhoun, former editor of the parenting Web site Babble.com and author of the upcoming book, “Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids.”

“It’s so taken for granted now that there is this very thin line between public and private,” she says. “Whatever you do inside your home, even if you’re little, is for everybody to comment on and see over and over again.”

And, increasingly, to doubt. For when we finally emerge from the balloon boy fever dream, we’re going to be another notch more disbelieving of our fellow Americans.

“The next time something like this happens, you’re going to have a lot of people going, ‘It’s probably for a reality show,’” Sherri Shepherd of “The View” said Monday. “You have desensitized us a little bit.”

“We did this for the show.” An American epitaph if there ever was one. No need for the big tent anymore; these days, the entire republic is the Greatest Show on Earth. And every TV, every laptop, every handheld device is a ticket to admission. The Wizard of Oz would be proud — brain, heart and courage aside.

And old Thomas Jefferson? Maybe not so much. He feared hot air, albeit not the balloon variety. “We, too, shall encounter follies,” he said, predicting his country’s future. But he expected brighter days: “The vigor of our country,” he said, “will get the better of them.”

EDITOR’S NOTE — Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.