Sense and Sensibility

Our Revolting Cultural Balloon Ride

I never realized how incomplete my mornings were until I watched 6-year-old Falcon Heene projectile vomiting on the “Today” show.

In a moment sure to loom large in his childhood reverie, the most famous attic dweller since Anne Frank upchucked in response to co-host Meredith Vieira’s probing interrogation.

Falcon (and my brother’s name is owl) Heene is the famous “balloon boy” whose imagined runaway balloon flight transfixed a nation only just recovering from the breakup of Jon and Kate. While authorities called out the cavalry and media fanned out all over the Rockies, Falcon nested in the attic, fearing his father’s wrath or auditioning for another reality show. His father, Richard Henne, a reality show reject whose backyard enthusiasms include low-cost aircraft assembly, insisted the frantic hunt was not a hoax.

This is a man with a storm-mobile in his garage who, when not hurtling himself and family into the eye of tornadoes, is searching the ozone for E.T’s brother.

The “balloon boy” story was the lead story on all three networks. It was on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, this newspaper and USA Today.

It was, like Octomom, one of those queer news belches we are at pains to ignore, and are complicit in perpetuating. Falcon will no more vanish into deserved obscurity than Jon and Kate or Richard Hatch or Susan Boyle or Anna Nicole Smith. Never mind that the child may have a bird brain for a father and a nut hatch for a mother, we all want to be in our living room to watch the kid go completely batty.

The New York Times listed no fewer than seven reporters on its errant balloon story. The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz insisted that the “floating silver portabello mushroom” story was impossible to ignore.

And maybe it was ‑ for the cable networks that have air time to chew up or the hapless Associated Press, obliged to cover any incident regardless of its absurdity. The issue is not that the media covered the story, but that it treated a two-hour mishap with the same rigorous inquiry it devotes to suicide bombers or health-care legislation. That lack of discrimination plays right into the hands of publicity hounds like Heene, who cannot seem to breathe outside of a camera lens. In addition to his storm-chasing exploits, Heene was in the cast “Wife Swap,” which sounds like a John Updike novel but was actually an ABC reality program.

In an out-of-the-mouths-of-babes moment, broadcast on CNN, Heene asked Falcon why the boy didn’t respond to repeated calls of his name. Falcon said, “You guys said … that, um, we did this for the show.”

All sorts of indecencies are done “for the show” these days, which is why we now have top chefs trying to impale one another on the rotisserie and “real housewives” who think a cat fight was what they did in the Roman coliseum. The more outrageous, indecorous and vulgar the outburst, the more air time, ink and Google-hits it engenders.

Where we once looked to television and the media to tell us what family life should look like, we now look to TV to gauge how much we can get away with.

Just how much the public demands this voyeurism and how much of it is foisted upon them is anyone’s guess. Certainly, networks would not continue to ladle these things out like baked ziti if viewers were running from their living rooms in disgust. For many Americans, stressed by financial and familial woes, reality shows are guilty pleasures akin to beach books or fat-free yogurt. For still other Americans, balloon boys, Jon and Kate and Susan Boyle are peculiar obsessions only a cloistered monk could avoid. I have never watched “Jon and Kate Plus 8” but feel I know this dysfunctional family intimately by virtue of the attention the show receives from other media.

Nowhere in this orgy of prurience does anyone seem to care about the emotional health of the individuals – many of them children – involved in this debacle. When Falcon Heene lost his cookies live in front of an audience of 6 million it was a tipping point moment. That was the time for TV viewers to look at themselves and consider the cultural wreckage they had wrought. When a little boy vomits under the glare of the klieg lights it’s time for those paying the electric bill to pull the plug.

contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

And You Thought ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Was Bad

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”

I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)

But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.

I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”

And then the report came out.

The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.

The report, nine years in the making,  details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.

These were the places that would erase your shame.

What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:

 Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.

The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.

The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.

I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.

But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell  whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

Do we have the mettle to stand up to this?

I’m beginning to wonder if we have the mettle for this.
Austerity, to the fervid American consumer, can sound like a wallpaper pattern, something exotic and obscure, like chastity to a VH1 viewer.
Prudence has not exactly been this country’s financial beacon of late, and now that the economy is crumbling like gorgonzola on bed of mesclun greens, we’re going to have to start acquainting ourselves with its sober charms.
Few societies have taken so avidly to profligacy as 21st century Americans. In the last 20 years, per capita consumption has grown 45 percent but our annual savings rate is in the negative digits. Alas, until the housing industry exploded like an overcooked gnocchi recently, nobody seemed to care. Indeed, so dependent has the economy become on consumer spending that when the country was struck by terrorists in 2001, the chief executive suggested our best response was to go out and spend.
Well, that is something we do well.
“Seduced by the enticements of a global market, the American consumer has in recent decades fallen victim to an orgy of self-indulgence,” writes Dr. Peter C. Whybrown, author of “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough.” Whybrow notes that while productivity per person hour in the U.S. is comparable to that of most European nations, its material consumption per person is greater by one third.
“America’s traditional immigrant values of resourcefulness, thrift, prudence and an abiding concern for family and community have been hijacked by a commercially driven, all-consuming self-interest,” he writes.
For the past few years now, we have been worshipfully gobbling up all the adoring histrionics about the “greatest generation,” never stopping to consider that we might be put to the test.
Daily, it seems, we wake up to triple-digit Wall Street losses. Companies that have been household names for decades are filing for bankruptcy or asking for bailouts. Brands that have been synonymous with urban chic – like Starbucks and Gap – are holding on to the increasingly dim hope that Americans will still want to spend $3 for a cup of coffee or $22 for a T-Shirt. The legion of advertisers who have scuttled the distinction between want and need must be in paroxysms of panic that Americans might adopt the wet blanket of thrift.
This, of course, would be a seismic social change. This country throws out 68 pounds of clothing a year – that’s more than most others buy. Fifteen percent of the food we throw away has never been opened and is still within its expiration date. American women spend $7 billion annually on cosmetics -$1 billion more than it would cost to educate every child in the world. That $7 billion doesn’t count the 11.7 million cosmetic surgical and non-surgical procedures were performed in the United States in 2007 – a 446 percent increase in 10 years, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Surgery. The average American ate away from home an average of 4.2 meals per week in 2004.
For the still-frugal Americans who clip their own nails and dye their own hair, all of this prodigality has been difficult to endure. Not long ago, a woman called me, worried that her video-game-addicted grandchildren were oblivious to the reams of cash they were blithely tearing through. She had a terrific point. Arguably most prized consumer group are children ages four to 12, whose spending rose 400 percent between 1989 and 2002, when they spent $30 billion, reports economist Juliet B. Schor. We have suckled an entire generation on consumption, and now left them with the bill.
As a French friend of mine writes, “I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to function with less when they have known so much. Our corner of the world has been well spoiled and now we are taking away its big cookie.”