This time, it was missing white BOY as cable news went batshit loonball. When I heard the balloon had come down empty, my first thought was “he was never in that thing. He is hiding out somewhere because he knows damn well he is going to get the living evangelical foot-washing Baptist HELL beat out of him directly.” As I told somebody else, if I had scared the hell out of my parents, burned a million taxpayer dollars’ worth of emergency responders, and then put my parents on blast as UFO wackadoos, my dad would still be beating me, and he’s been dead since 1998. Seriously, I would have been wore out with a belt until I reached Heaven and Jesus looked at me and said “I reckon you had THAT coming.”
The fact that every news channel went the full OJ on this story, I think, speaks to something deeper in the American condition in 2009: people are scared shitless. They’ve been scared shitless for eight years, ever since the real world snuck in and bitch-smacked us all out of an idyllic world of intern scandals and Britney bullshit, and they’re still scared shitless, to the point where they need an ever-growing spiral of distraction (thus the horseshit that passes for news on the morning shows and cable channels) and an occasional outlet for all this inner fright, which is why people flip out on something like this that they can vicariously panic through.
We as a nation need a good long bout of therapy and probably some mild drugs – little Paxil in the water supply for a year, maybe – but at some point, if we want to continue functioning as a society, we have to stop freaking out all the time about everything.