This whole Balloon Boy thing is ridiculous. It’s amazing that the American people, and the media as well, have eaten this story up with more gusto than they did when Sarah Palin got the Vice President nomination. And for what? First of all, the kid wasn’t in the balloon, and second, it was staged!

The nation’s obsession with “reality” has gotten to the point where we need a serious intervention. It all started innocently enough with The Real World, but it has spiraled completely out of control. The whole Balloon Boy incident happened because the family in question is so tainted by the limelight after being on the TV show “Wife Swap” and allowing their children to rap obscenities on YouTube that they convinced the whole country that their kid was flying in a home-made balloon over the plains of Colorado, but is that their fault? To an extent, yes. But really, the Hennes are a telling symptom of the sickness that has taken hold of America.

Despite the fact that we are fighting a multi-front war with no end in sight, the President is taking hits left and right on everything from health care to marijuana reform to gay marriage, tent cities are popping up all over the place because so many people are out of work and homes, but on Friday, almost every paper in the country, from California to Maine, had Balloon Boy on the front page.

The kid was dragged to every news show on TV, which, in this era of 24/7 news, is saying a lot. And yet, not a single reporter could figure out that the incident was a hoax until the six-year-old Falcon accidently spit it out at Wolf Blitzer. So the entire police investigation, which probably cost a couple million dollars from the state of Colorado, was a wild goose chase set up by the parents for… A chance at a reality television show.

Something needs to change. We need to realize that the obsession with bad TV on which people live their lives totally artificially in front of us is not culture. It gives us nothing positive. Not a single thing. But, more than anything, it’s the media’s fault for continuing the endless parade of mindless programming because it’s less expensive than a well-scripted and creative dramedy or actually covering the news of the day that affects our lives and our futures.

The moral that we can take from the Balloon Boy is this: we have taken the reality TV thing and created a monster. Let’s kill the monster.