Opinion: In today’s pages, heroes: Washington, Obama, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez
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In Monday’s Op-Ed pages, columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes on the hero-worship and hero-tossing of Olympic swimmers, baseball players and national icons.
The truth is that we are deeply conflicted about the idea of heroes. Men and women who are larger than life attract and repel us. On the one hand, our deeply ingrained egalitarianism makes us bridle at the notion that anyone is demonstrably better than everyone else. On the other, our patrimony -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention constant change -- is abstract and ephemeral; it’s difficult to grab hold of. Other nations and their citizens get to define themselves as unchanging through the generations; we seek continuity and meaning in symbols, from the founders to apple pie.
Historian Hugh Howard compares Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington with artist Shepard Fairey’s modern-day version, the Barack Obama poster.
Will Fairey’s poster become the analog for Obama? Only the unpredictable process of cultural selection can decide. But if the paradigm is Gilbert Stuart’s Washington, then the best-remembered recorder of Obama will have to convey to us a sense of the man.
Julie Myers Wood, former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, writes about how Rapid Repat -- a program to quickly get legal and illegal immigrant criminals out of the U.S. -- might help with California’s prison overcrowding problem.
On the Editorial Page, The Times parses the new Obama Administration’s approach to ‘Af-Pak,’ the continuum that is Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also find fault with the Food and Drug Administration in the recent peanut-salmonella problem. Finally, we return to the subject of a federal shield law in its latest iteration, and express hope that Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. will help rather than hurt the passage of a careful compromise.