i think people's tendency to promote other people to the status of little gods is always problematic. this controls, for example, the way we experience the history of the arts and the intellect in an inordinate way. the masterpiece gets promoted to a status beyond the human, and once you've soaked in the trans-human reputation of plato, or a milton, or a michelangelo, or an einstein, there can be no context in which they emerged, no atmosphere of thought or making in which they operated: they become, among other things, inexplicable, incomprehensible. the right response to reading plato or seeing michelangelos, it seems to me, is disappointment: despite all the ecstatic mystical gobbledygook that surrounds them like an odoriferous gas, they turn out to be human after all. the stuff is, as the babygod nietzsche would say, all-too-human. the music of the beatles, experienced in the context of the insane bloat of their reception, is absurd in its mediocrity. now all this becomes actually physically dangerous when the tendency to worship is turned on political authorities, people who operate the machinery of war and repression and welfare. john kennedy as god is hilarious, but he's also starting up wars etc. oy the charisma, bathing us all in its mystical sexy god-juice. the american left, as it's demonstating in its obama ecstasy, is as much an authoritarian cult as that constructed around mussolini, though with a different aesthetic. so i would, er, be careful. at any rate, we can guarantee that there will be a larger and more intrusive state at the end of his administration than there was before, hedged around with cultic apparatus..