MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Heroes Lose Halos One By One” Ellis Henican Column, amNewYork, May 21, 2010
Say it ain’t so, Lance! 
And you, Miss USA, pas-dedeuxing with a pole.
And you, libidinous Lawrence Taylor and bad-news Ben Roethlisberger! Suddenly, all our heroes are exheroes.
Heroes these days aren’t just hard to find, they’re becoming as rare as honest politicians and sports stars who actually believe in a level playing field.
The world of politics is an especiallyrich vein of broken idols: Eliot “Client No. 9” Spitzer, David “Drop the Charges” Paterson, and now Richard “They Spat on Us After Vietnam” Blumenthal.
And next comes the growing list of beloved professional athletes ensnared in the latest doping scandal. Alex Rodriguez, Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes and Tiger Woods — as if his halo weren’t tilting enough already.
It may not be that people were any more heroic in days gone by. It’s just that we’re so much more adept at discovering their flaws. Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to withstand the scrutiny of TMZ.com?
“Ah, Mr. Jefferson, what exactly is your relationship with that Hemings woman?” How would the Lincoln- Douglas debates have looked if they were conducted on MSNBC: “You moron, Abe!” “You idiot, Steve!”
In the glare of constant media attention and with an insatiable public appetite for scandal, even the most heroic among us reveal unexpected flaws: Motives that aren’t as pure as they should be. Follow-through that’s woefully inept. Plain old cheating everywhere.
It’s deep in the human psyche, this craving for someone to look up to.
And over the generations, people keep finding heroes in sports and religion and — hard as it is to believe — yes, even in politics.
The whole concept of a sports hero now sounds like an oxymoron. And look how quickly the sheen has been scuffed off the heroic Barack Obama. Can you name any politician today you’d call a hero?
And the biggest news from the religious world recently was the “Rentboy” scandal involving the co-founder of the Family Research Council, a moralistic anti-gay-rights group.
Fallen heroes everywhere.
We seek. We find. We celebrate our heroes. We are disappointed by them.
And we never learn.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican.
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perhaps the problem is we put halos on the wrong people. If we look more at those who act from the heart with real dedication rather than those seeking the wow of headlines and acts to reach agenda we might be less disappointed.