My mouthpiece says I wasn't very respectful toward Martin Luther King in my "Comments on the comments..." He's probably right and if anyone was offended I'm sorry. But I think the point that drove what I said is worth discussing. (I said, "Do we mean King the sainted matryr, or King the womanizing headline-grabber?") The issue for me is, the man was a great hero, undeniably. But he wasn't a saint. Nor was it his job to be one. He had a goal; a brilliant understanding of how to work toward it; and tremendous bravery. He was a risk-taking leader and acted heroically, giving his followers by example the courage to do the same, and ultimately dying because of his public positions. What the hell else do we have a right to demand from the guy?

Our tendency is to canonize heroes, and then turn around and vilify them when it turns out they're not saints. Even if they're still heroes. Thus on one level Pete Rose, a great baseball player, can't get in to the Hall of Fame because he's a lousy person. The Baseball Hall of Fame, not the People Hall of Fame. And on another, Bill Clinton's inability to keep it in his pants was enough for a large group of American voters to reject the Presidential candidate of his party.

This is a subject very close to my heart, the difference between saints and heroes; I just spent 2 years writing a novel where that's one of the central questions. I think it's a dangerous demand to make of heroes, that they also be saints: most of them aren't, and discovering that again and again, if we were expecting something else, makes us all cynical.