bipedal mammal - often irresponsible fools

A Geo. Mason University Economist offering opinion on economists and politicians: Economists who offer advice on public policy without pausing to ponder the nature of the vehicle – the state – to be driven often appear to be non-ideological and scientific. In fact they’re too often irresponsible fools. ......... ........Bipedal mammal who holds the office at any particular time – signify if not a kind of veneration, a species of mystical awe, for the office (and, hence, for whatever bipedal mammal currently is) commonly called “President of the United States”? Such oohing and aahhing suggests to me that the oohers and aahhers regard the office-holding mammal as being somehow greater than the rest of us – a greatness and magnificence achieved merely by that bipedal-mammal’s success at having duped or enchanted large numbers of people into voting him or her into that office. ........ Of course, no modern person consciously thinks of himself or herself as one who regards the bipedal mammal called “President” as possessing powers to work miracles. But I suspect, quite strongly, that there is today at work, even in our modern world, the same unfortunate human instincts that for eons directed the human psyche to believe that Pharaohs and Kings and Queens and Maharajahs and Popes and other potentates somehow, to some degree, are superior to ordinary people in personal powers and wisdom and strength and courage and access to the divine. (Why would it not be so? We moderns are not at all very far removed, biological-time-wise, from those eras steeped in absurd mysticisms.) ........ It was the first time that I ever met a president of the executive branch of the national government in the United States. (I wound up meeting two, sort of, as Jimmy Carter was there also, he having won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.) I was thoroughly underwhelmed. My impression of Bush was that he’s more charismatic in person than he is on television. His charisma, however, still fell far short of making me feel any awe for the man or “the office” that he held. Quite the contrary. I couldn’t wait to leave; being near such people creeps me out. They are, after all, merely bipedal mammals like the rest of us, yet who fancy themselves, and are fancied by their groupies, as being something more blessed. (Actually, these particular bipedal mammals are not quite like the rest of us: they specialize, and succeed, in practicing in the dark arts of politics – arts that no truly decent bipedal mammal wishes to specialize in for long, and certainly not in ways that bring success.) Williams Ellery Channing’s 1828 is from Williams Ellery Channing’s 1828 essay “Remarks on the Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte”; it is quoted on page 230 of Political Writings of Richard Cobden (1903); specifically, it’s quoted in Cobden’s 1836 essay “Protection of Commerce“: A people which wants a saviour, which does not possess an earnest and pledge of freedom in its own heart, is not yet ready to be free.