Fame: the new opium of the masses
Swapping your wife clearly doesn't cut it. Well, not in the world of Richard Heene.
His fifteen minutes of fame on some American reality show clearly wasn't the fix he'd hoped for. Such were his cravings for the limelight that he cooked up the half-arsed story that his son, Falcon, was stuck inside a weather balloon that had broken loose.
And, as we all now know, that idea - along with the balloon - has since come down to earth with predictable consequences.
Little Falcon - the boy that never really flew - was hiding in the loft and innocently let this slip when interviewed live on telly. Collapse of stout party.
As a parable of our times it doesn't come much better. An obssession with ephemera, fame, celebrity and the trappings of tat and WAGgery have gripped a goodly portion of society and the global media circus has found a vocal, self-seeking minority that hands it content on a plate. The Heenes are just the latest example.
The story gripped America, then the world for - if it were true - it had everything: hope, faith (people prayed; Lordy, did they pray), the kindness of strangers and, ultimately tragedy as the balloon landed and little Falcon was nowhere to be seen.
Is the media furious that it's been duped? Not a bit of it. The story's ending provides as much hearty content on which to feast as its beginning, from the eminently quotable sheriff ("the family put on a very good show for us, and we bought it") to the semi-literate note scrawled on a scrap of paper by the family and pinned to their door after they'd legged it.
Suddenly, the limelight they craved isn't quite so appealing after all.
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