So now he's a literary hero character?
Yep. So to justify the excessive coverage yesterday, the boy is now being compared to famous stories and there's a rush to explain the childhood habit of playing hide and seek (minus the seek part). The Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer analogy completely escapes me. I was pretty sure a big part of that story was the quest of young people to strike it out on their own, not to escape feelings that they are uncomfortable with.
To me, it is a sign of how excessive this story became that even I heard of it. Because the particulars in retrospect do not strike me as particularly newsworthy. Even if we reflect that many of them were unknown at the time, they were relatively obvious if you asked questions that were going unanswered by news coverage: like how do they know for sure the kid is even on the thing, something which became more painfully obvious that nobody asked when he wasn't in the crash. I personally am going to side with Ariana Huffington on this one: we bumped off coverage on Afghanistan for this, really? Are we that paranoid about children in this country that we cannot ask sensible questions and move on until there are more facts? Had this been a movie mystery, I would have figured it out by the first 10 minutes and taken a nap for the rest of the hour. Apparently we have no need of rational moderation on such things.
As an update, it appears they're considering filing charges against the boy's parents. If this results in some sort of fiscal compensation for the costs accrued by the state agencies chasing down their false report (when they could have been doing something else more productive like shaking down..., err I mean arresting people), I will consider this whole sage to have had a happy ending.
16 October 2009
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3 comments:
I really wish I hadn't watched that interview. Those kids look terrified, and he gives me the creeps. And that was before I found this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/falcon-heene-balloon-case_n_324116.html Proves nothing, of course, but it doesn't endear him to me, either.
I saw that there was an interview but I have no interest in watching it. I have seen that all the family garbage is coming out as a consequence of them essentially rolling the media. Good times.
If it turns out to be an elaborate hoax then they should have to pay for the police and state business that was stirred up (like you would have to pay for the ambulance ride). I suspect it's mostly just a little boy and an odd family though. Which is hardly a news story on its own (as entertaining as that may be in different circumstances and different from the usual fare of goofy news that I get a sort of background radiation from instead)
And it's definitely not worth diverting attention from critical issues like say, the big fucking war with a big fork in the road type decision involved in it. Or the ongoing climate and health care bills. Hell, even Rush Limbaugh getting kicked off the Rams ownership billet is a better "story" than this was.
I did like that one! (I'm not saying his name.) And I could not care less about football, really.
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