Good evening everyone:

Who would have thought that the sighting of a Chinese weather balloon could have created such a kerfuffle.  It’s not as if we haven’t had mysterious balloon incidents before. None as serious as this, probably. As Mark Twain reminded us, though, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

When untangling something this weighty, I tend toward the comforting familiar of my childhood. So, I went back into the treasure trove of books my mother brought home from her days as a librarian in the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Collection of illustrated children’s books. It was illuminating.

I started in 1934 with a closer look at King Babar’s ballooning with his queen, Celeste - captured elegantly by Jean de Brunhoff:

It was almost certainly a more peaceful time, but Babar and Celeste’s didn’t raise as much as an eyebrow, even as they drifted away from land and over the water:

Indeed, they started a whole movement – something that probably isn’t in the cards for the Chinese escapade:

It’s tempting to think of that as a kinder, gentler time, free from the paranoias that attend today’s cross-border airborne incursions. It accordingly may be that wartime provides a better gauge of balloons-as-threats. So, fast forward to 1941 with Curious George. As chronicled by Margaret and H.A. Rey, Curious George absconds with a street vendor’s balloons and up he goes, giving rise to all manner of mayhem – chases, allegations of criminality, and ultimately zoo-time. Much closer to the current day’s reaction, although he didn’t get shot down:

Even closer to today’s reaction was a balloon incident in 1955, when the French government had to use every ounce of its diplomatic restraint not to scramble fighter jets when a boy and his best friend, a red balloon, drifted precariously close to President Jules Coty’s presidential palace. Harrowing – captured in chilling detail by the filmmaker and writer Albert Lamorisse (for Jeopardy fans, the same person who invented the board game “Risk,” which is all about taking over somebody else’s space):

I’m not sure any of the three examples shed much light on what a reasonable response to a mysterious balloon should be. Back to the mother-lode – the one floating animal we could all readily identify.. I suspect that A.A. Milne – who was writing almost one-hundred years ago – might have advocated that we actually talk to those sending balloons into the sky before we assume the worst and start firing heat-seeking missiles at them. That is certainly what Igor did when he couldn’t figure out what in the world was floating above him one winter’s day in Ashdown Forest:

I’ve copied Anthony Blinken on this note, although it seems it may be a bit too late.

Rip

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