"The American genius is about bringing out the extraordinary in ordinary people."

This ludicrous blurb is more appropriate for a reality show than a serious political discussion: "Look at all those schlubs just like me. They do tricks on TV!"

This is flatter-the-mob populism at its worst.

The real story is more like tremendously extraordinary people fighting to allow ordinary people to do ordinary things.

In Europe a farmer was just a peon bound to the land and forced to subsist on a fraction of his crop while landlords ate the rest, but in America those ordinary farmers could live ordinary human lives, because Washington and Jefferson and Madison made a republic to protect them from the lords of old Europe.

In the Old South a black man was nothing but a thing, but Lincoln made a war against the institution of slavery, and when none of his generals would fight a battle against other white men to free the slaves, he replaced them one after another until William Tecumseh Sherman broke the back of the South, and Martin Luther King and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson completed this great work, and none of them were ordinary men, but they made it possible for black men and women to live ordinary lives, and if pampered zillionaires like Arianna Huffington don't think that's good enough, and try to inflate expectations beyond ordinary life, the rest of us should remember that for most of human history almost nobody had the privilege of living an ordinary human life, and almost nobody enjoys that privilege today outside a few lucky countries like the United States.

It's easy to lose the extraordinary privilege of leading an ordinary life by chasing "lifestyles" that only exist on TV, and the United States has almost managed to trade away the ordinary pleasures of human existence for the pig-paradise of unlimited consumerism.

If we somehow draw back from the brink of economic and environmental disasters, and somehow pass along the extraordinary privilege of living an ordinary human life to the next generation, it won't be because flatter-the-mob populists like Arianna Huffington have conjured up dreams of reality-show superheroes...

It will be because extraordinary leaders like Winston Churchill have inspired ordinary people to make the ordinary sacrifices of ordinary human existence for the common good.

"Blood, sweat, toil, and tears..." There's nothing extraordinary about any of it.