The recent negative responses to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize reminded me: I need a hero. I’m pretty sure everything they told us in grade school was a lie. George Washington probably didn’t cut down a cherry tree, but he may have been a gay pot smoker. Not that either of those things are bad, it’s just not what they told us as gullible children. So Columbus was a brutal slave trader, and Jefferson had children with his slave wife, Mother Theresa was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and they even try to imply that Lincoln was gay. Which would be AWESOME if it’s true; that would make the first Republican president a gay man! But seriously, I think we need some heroic figures. We’re a mess. The neo-cons tried to use Leo Stauss’ belief in the noble lie to create an enemy to fill the void left by the end of the cold war, and that strategy has clearly failed. Not only did their proposed enemy never materialize, no heroes showed up to vanquish him. I say a lot of these things in jest, but I really do believe we have a crisis on our hands. This collage condensed from Bill Moyers’ “A World of Ideas” sums up some of what I’m talking about, as does this piece: We’ve Abandoned Our Heroes, But We Still Need Them. I think we need some heroes. Any suggestions?