Do we want to be fooled? Yes clearly. As Bawer points out, real heroes are not egomaniacs and narcissists, they are humble and do often thankless work for very little if any reward. The important thing here is that Mortenson is and was so popular precisely because he is such a narcissist and brazenly deluded and deluding, he reflects on our own vapid society where fluffy Oprah ‘values’ and anodyne feelgood slogans are worshipped and where shiny surface is everything.
This is not unrelated to the secular messiah cult built around the cheap-suit huckster Obama. To call Obama vapid is an understatement after all. The roots of the problem lie deeper than the idiotic media who popularised this Mortenson palubum (at the end of the day the media are telling people what they want to hear). It’s with so-called (mis)education, mindless escapisms, a consumerist culture which actively encourages egomania, narcissism and vapidity, but calls it anything other than what it is so as to make it all palatable and respectable.
Why would we except a public, where the popular culture continues to sink to new lows, to be anything but dupes and duffuses in the main? In hindsight 20/20 it’s all so predictable. We should have seen it coming.
