Fame's Frankensteins

Why, in an age of tolerance, are we so keen to lynch our heroes?

Modern heroes are populists, like Woods or Giggs. They live in a world no different to ours - save in terms of skill, fame, fortune and opportunity. We mould them to be what we cannot: then seem shocked when we discover their faults - horrified Frankensteins rejecting the monsters we make, though the fault rests as much in the design as the object.

Heroes play and are governed by different rules. We create them to fulfill our dreams; we also destroy them on waking. If footballers turn out to have feet of clay, it can make feats on the pitch seem superfluous. Superhuman gifts become flaws: too frail or far-fetched to protect their greatness.

Reputation is an absolute, like Justice's sword. Exposed as no better than us, we turn on the great, tearing down the idols we worshiped.  As Oscar Wilde once said: the rage against art of the bourgeois mind is "the hatred of caliban at seeing his face in the glass." For that, substitute the public and fame.

Or truth and the press, who stand to gain most from iniquity.