The Inevitable Disappointment of the Worshipful--and How to Remedy It

Victor Davis Hanson assesses the three debates between Obama and Romney. He notes that "hope and change" has been vastly downgraded this time around to "the lesser of two evils," which, I predict, won't exactly lure 'em into the voting booth. In the prologue of her 2005 book Heroes: A History of Hero Worship, Lucy Hughes-Hallet offers this warning to those--hello, Obamasoxers!--who invest their dreams in a mere mortal, thereby elevating him to super-human status (and often diminishing themselves):

Thomas Carlyle, who wrote on the same subject...a century and a half ago, declared that there was "no nobler feeling" than hero worship. "Heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest god-like Form of Man...it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man's life." I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfillment, which they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it "the germ...of all religion hitherto known," but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice. 

In other words, hero-worship is a kind of laziness. So get off your duffs, Americans, and don't elect the guy who thinks he's Jesus H. Christ (and who somehow managed to persuade you of the same). Hand the reigns to the guy who has no delusions of grandeur, and who actually knows how to run things.

Simple as that, really.