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When I was growing up, I was under the impression that one should aspire to be morally impressive if one should ever seek to obtain higher office.

I was also under the impression that I was going to marry Leonardo DiCaprio and play for the WNBA.

But for what it’s worth, I was pretty sure that if I ever wanted to be President, it’d probably look bad if I when I grew up and got old, no one could say anything good about me. If I aspire to something as lofty as the United States Presidency, I hope I would see my friends at rallies with each letter of LEAST COMPLICIT WITH EVIL painted on their bellies.

Or something to that effect.

You’ll figure it out. I believe in you.

But is it too much to ask in 2016 that our Presidential candidates be morally impressive? Not just decent human beings who refrain from cold-blooded manslaughter, but genuinely impressive in character, gumption and grit?

We might ask upon whose counsel they now turn to when they face moral dilemmas rather than keep pretending nominally belonging to a Church means they lean on anyone there.

We might move to engage candidates in lengthy conversations about the development of their ethical framework.

Building a democratic filtration system so the public might screen out ethical impurities.

I know right now from where I sit that if I lived my life in such a way that I ended up like Hillary Clinton in my sixties, I would consider my life a moral failure and myself a villain. Policies and precedents that she advised her husband to bring into the world have been found irrefutably inhumane, especially towards women, minorities and poor people on practically every continent. On my back would rest the accountability for the suffering of millions throughout the world. When I die I would know there will be lives destroyed because of decisions I made or failed to make. My conscience would most certainly not be clear. I’d consider myself a monster.

Again, I was raised with the expectation that one should aspire to be morally impressive if one is to seek the highest honor of being the leader of the free world. To be frank: if I were as complicit in the war on humanity as Hillary Clinton, I would not be running for President. I’d be too busy seeking baptism and redemption.

No, this is no hyperbole. I mean the things I am writing here as much as I mean anything.

Public service absent social integrity is basically tyranny, right? That’s what I was taught. I’m fairly certain you did not pledge allegiance to one nation under the lesser of two evils. This is not the liberty you were promised.

If you were anything like me, you were nursed on the morality of heroes. George Washington could not lie. Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. American textbook authors so desperately want to tell the best of ourselves that they do so at the expense of telling the truth. But that’s what America’s about: we’re less about being heroes than making ourselves seen as heroic.

And no other nation in the world invests in the hero-making industry like America. No, sir. Not even close.

America, I mean this in earnest: one of our top national exports right now is ersatz heroism. Americans invest ourselves obsessively into manufacturing heroic (and antiheroic) theater. We as a people are so privileged that many of us are even paid a sizable amount of money to draw up hero narratives so that poor people around the world might escape the misery and tedium of their actual lives. On top of this, there are people who draw a fairly ripe living writing thoughtpieces about the fake heroes other people make up.

Absurd.

Right now, every human being I know with a pulse is consuming multiple streams of heroic theater. We are surrounded by narratives of salvation. We watch them religiously the way our recent ancestors might have attended church. We allow them to ground virtually all of our social conversation.

And yet, while there are probably literally thousands of essays written on the subject of Jon Snow’s heroism, far fewer I have seen this year about the actual heroism necessary to be a good President or Congressman. Apparently we ask nothing more of our leaders save that they wear suits and attend an Ivy League law school. If you listen to the pundits, it’s almost as if the scrutiny of politician’s moral biography is irrelevant but Jon Snow’s of the utmost importance.

Consider that.

Seriously.

What the actual fuck.

What’s wrong with us, America?

Get your head on straight, team.

Who among us are actually our better angels?

How do we make them run for President?