DEUS EX MACHINA

If prayer works as promised, then Barack Obama, the twice-vested 44th President of these United States, should be in good shape. In the days immediately surrounding his whirlwind inauguration, President Obama was prayed over in a veritable maelstrom of prayer services, benedictions, invocations, supplications, implorations and entreaties.

The charasmatic president is going to need all the succor he can muster, whether from divine or mundane sources. The litany of crises confronting the planet's de-facto most popular leader has been well- and oft-documented, from Hoboken to Honolulu; Concord to Congress. The collapse of capitalism as we know it, home foreclosures on a scale akin to a sale on five day-old fish, unemployment rates ratcheting skyward, companies declaring bankruptcy in record numbers, 47 million Americans living without health insurance and a national debt climbing to the stratosphere are just a few of the issues jostling for "me-first" attention from the President.

And those are only the domestic concerns. We don't even want to think about national security, the Guantanamo Bay black hole, our trussed-like-a-Thanksgiving-turkey position in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian President (sounds like, according to my impeccably funny source, Whoopi Goldberg) Ahm-a-dinnajacket's determination to "go nuclear," the no-way-out Israeli-Palestinian quagmire and, oh yes, global warming, for good measure!

Prayer circle, anyone? One need only look to media pictures of the estimated
1.8 million who stood for hours in freezing cold temperatures on Inauguration Day, having no chance of catching a glimpse of the actual man, to recognize what has, for many, been rock-star adulation. Perhaps not since the Sermon on the Mount have expectations run so high. But it's not a rock-star the people crave: What they seek is a Deus ex Machina, a God out-of-thin air.

As the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount knew, deification comes with a hefty price tag: feeding the hordes. President Obama, well-schooled in the dangers of living life on a pedestal or in an ivory tower, addresses the multitudes with the papal "we" over the first-person "I" when delineating the mountain of work that lies ahead. All things considered, it might be a good idea, not only to keep on praying, but to step it up. That way, maybe we can be assured of our own miracle, a modern-day equivalent of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.