Harpo Dog

The cult of personality has never been that appealing to me. I will invariably find fault with whomever I might set high upon a pedestal. Human beings have the tragic and usually fatal flaw of being human. I have tried to maintain a certain misty-eyed distance from people like Bruce Springsteen and John Elway. I am certain if I were to pay any more attention to them than I already have, that the illusion would be shattered and the bubble would burst. It's amazing to watch an entire city (more or less) go through that same kind of denial with Barry Bonds.
Who cares if he took steroids? Steroids don't affect hand eye coordination anyway. Babe Ruth drank beer during prohibition, and that was a banned substance. This is a stadium full of folks who are not aware that the rest of the planet is booing this man in every other city in which he appears at the plate.
Need a new semi-major-demigod? How about Oprah Winfrey? "She's a really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa," says Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has written two papers analyzing the religious aspects of Winfrey. "Oprah has emerged as a symbolic figurehead of spirituality." The Pope can't compete with that - when was the last time the Vatican gave away cars?
"She's a moral monitor, using herself as the template against which she measures the decency of a nation," Lofton says. This was made most apparent this past season on her show when she initially lauded James "A Million Little Pieces - Lies, Mostly" Frey, then just as abruptly brought him low with a very public tongue lashing (which wasn't nearly as sexy as it sounds). "I left the impression that the truth is not important," she said on the show. "I am deeply sorry about that because that is not what I believe." Jamie Foxx and Ellen DeGeneres have both suggested (with varying levels of jest) that God might in fact be a black woman named Oprah. Claire Zulkey, 26, an Oprah follower who has written about Winfrey in her online blog at zulkey.com, says, "I think that if this were the equivalent of the Middle Ages and we were to fast-forward 1,200 years, scholars would definitely think that this Oprah person was a deity, if not a canonized being."
All that is well and good - but I think it's a real good thing that they don't test talk-show hosts for steroids.