There’s only one question remaining about the father of the Balloon-boy-who-wasn’t. Clearly he’s completely insane, but is he criminally insane?
“We feel it’s incumbent on us as an agency to attempt to reinterview them and establish whether this is [an] actual event,” Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden said Friday.
And then Wittgenstein rotated along his subterranean bilateral axis. I love it when people struggle with terminology in a way that sounds philosophical. The Sheriff’s “was this an actual event” investigation reminds me of Rumsfeld’s unintentional poem, dubbed Happenings. Rumsfeld’s news briefs were avant-garde, a kind of ready-made, or “found”, poetry that I didn’t think could exist (they were, perhaps, an “unknown known” — punctuation mine):
Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day,
That don’t happen.It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t –
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.Everyone’s so eager to get the story,
Before, in fact, the story’s there,
That the world is constantly being fed,
Things that haven’t happened.All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened –It’s going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing
The poor Sheriff is suddenly faced with an Epistemological problem for which he has received absolutely no training. Hopefully Rumsfeld’s poetry will help him wrestle with the absurdity of his duties:
“We believe, at this time, that it was a real event.”
Tags: news, Philosophy, Surreal
Is there a chance that the officer knows that Richard Keene is a nut job and is trying to keep him calm by saying such benign things as “We believe at this time that this was a real event?” Nut jobs can do some pretty desperate things if they feel they are being cornered—entire families have been massacred by insane fathers.
Whoa, good call Everdawn — You were totally right:
He was lying when he said, “We believe, at this time, that it was a real event.” Deeper and deeper! It looks like Rumsfeld’s poem was of an unknown-known level of appropriateness.