Now there are votive candles that one can burn as a prayer to Saint Obama:

I’m not saying Barack Obama intends this, but I think many Americans are actually devising a new religion around him as their savior. It’s a secular kind of salvation, yes, but that is all many people can conceive of. Nevertheless, this hope for salvation demands their faith, their adoration, and their service.

In earlier posts on this topic, some of you thought the people who say “Obama is my Jesus” and the like must be joking. I don’t think they are. I’m sure the readers of this blog who support Obama do so for his policies and because they are looking for some kind of alternative to the current administration. But he has supporters who have little idea of his policies who zealously are putting their faith in HIM.

This is natural, by the way, a tendency found in nearly all cultures throughout history, to think of their rulers as divine. When Obama gets elected, we may see again the figure of the divinized ruler. I don’t intend this as a political point, but as an observation about the reversion to a cultural paganism that can rush into a theological void.

In our search for silver linings to the economic clouds, consider Michele Catalano’s argument that our financial woes may return us to a nobler version of the storied “American dream.”

Although the term was coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, who defined it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement,” it really was, for the most part, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Over the years, the dream has changed accordingly, defined by what we think will bring us happiness. However, it has not changed in a good way.

Long ago, the American Dream was one of simplicity. The proverbial white-picket-fence dream was made of both tangibles and intangibles; everyone wanted a home of their own for their family and a steady job that would provide not only the house, but for the comfort, safety, and well-being of their family. That’s what the dream was about. Prosperity was found not in the money you made or the things you owned, but the feeling of well-being that came with providing a comfortable life for your family. If you owned the land you lived on and your kids were healthy and your wife was able to put a hot meal on the table at dinner time, life was good. You were living the American Dream. Maybe you could even buy a car to take the family on a beach vacation.

In recent years, not only has the concept of the American Dream changed, but so has the attitude toward achieving that dream. . . .

It looks like, for a lot of people, somewhere along the line the American Dream morphed into the American Rich and Famous Lifestyle Fantasy. They have traded the intangible stuff our forefathers’ dreams were made of for unabashed materialism. Gone are the dreams of the white picket fence, two adorable children, a cute little dog, and a station wagon. Now they dream of McMansions with Lincoln Expeditions in the four-car garage, right next to the ATVs and Jet Skis. They dream of perfect children who go to the most elite schools and wear designer clothing, and they want purebred dogs that come with pedigree papers. For a lot of Americans, that’s where the dream lies: in large-screen televisions and private schools, in built-in swimming pools and first-class plane tickets.

Yale economist Jonathan Macey shows how the government bailout plan has contributed to the panic on Wall Street and to the crisis in the finance sector. The Treasury’s quick action immediately undercut all confidence in the free market and then put measures into effect that would prevent the free market from exercising its usual corrective mechanisms. From The Government Is Contributing to the Panic - WSJ.com:

By the time the bailout package was passed, market sentiment had darkened to mirror the government’s own pessimism about the ability of markets to play a salutary role in repairing the fractured capital market. The notion that the government rather than the private sector can create a market for distressed bank assets seems particularly misguided.

The solutions being implemented also send the message that resources devoted to risk management are wasted. All of these plans reward the financial institutions that acted like lemmings by chasing the mortgage-related debt bubble rather than rewarding the financial institutions that exercised restraint and risk avoidance and independent thought and action. This unfortunate “heads Wall Street Wins, tails America loses” economic policy is wholly inconsistent with the principles of personal and corporate responsibility that are essential to a functional free market.

Firms like Merrill Lynch that took decisive steps to deal with their problems now look like suckers, as do banks that watched their leverage ratios and paid diligently into a deposit insurance program that offers protection on a far smaller scale than their investment banking rivals are getting for nothing. . . .

The Bear Stearns bailout, the restrictions on short-selling and the government’s new $700 billion commitment to buy toxic mortgage-based assets all share the same fundamental flaw: They prevent the market from imposing discipline on banks guilty of massive over-leveraging and excessive risk-taking. Moreover, they punish prudent managers who invested conservatively, kept their companies’ debt at reasonable levels and worked hard to raise new capital when necessary. The SEC’s attack on short-selling punishes savvy traders who invested resources and effort in identifying companies with too much debt and unrealistically valued assets.

Letting markets work is messy and costly. Nevertheless, the only sensible way to deal with the current crisis is to force the companies who created the mess to bear at least some of the costs of their mistakes. Most of all, if the markets are to get back on track our regulators must put an immediate stop to their current practice of publicly demonizing the markets and work to restore confidence in the system.