The recent "Balloon Boy" fiasco provides a good mile marker for how far we have come -- or fallen -- since mass audience television was introduced just about 60 years ago.

Within a few years, we had philosophers, educators and politicians calling TV the "great wasteland," even though, by today's cable network standards, what they had in the 1950s and ‘60s seems closer to what might have been seen at the old Globe Theatre (the fact millions of TV-drenched Americans wouldn't have a clue what the Globe Theatre was probably is another indicator.)

Reality television, while sometimes interesting or informative in an anthropological sense, also has quickly sunk the medium to new depths of crassness and triviality. Why should anyone doubt, then, that former and would-be reality show participants might allow their 6-year-old to join in a hoax designed to promote copious amounts of publicity and generate a new reality show.

If guilty, Richard and Mayumi Heene should get the maximum sentence and pay the maximum fine, or there is no justice in the world.

In a wider sense, personal videocams and ubiquitous cell cameras have turned large swaths of two generations of Americans into narcissists who are always "on camera." In other words, always playing a part, always acting, never quite sure what it means to be their "real self."

Children whose parents videotape or shoot nearly their entire little lives -- not to mention their own lives -- aren't doing

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their offspring any favors. They are promoting a preening, self-centered attitude in the image of Hollywood-style specialness that in most cases is not deserved.

Down the line, this, by now, cultural norm spells trouble in adult relationships of all kinds, especially those involving significant others, because everyone thinks they are special.

As a society, we are used to putting up with the eccentricities of film or sports or fine arts or theater celebrities, but that presupposes they have exceptional talent, if not wit. Otherwise, they might quickly seem vacuous, phony, frivolous, narcissistic pains in the butt. In other words, guys who are just average dads and moms and kids should stay that way and not aim for Brangelina status. They won't make it.