Can We Hold Off on Building the Temple?

Don't they usually wait until a president has actually accomplished something before they start naming things after him?

There's a report out today that several schools and cities have already started this secular worship process.

Barack Obama took office barely 10 days ago, but already schools and streets are being renamed. In the Hempstead case they didn't even wait until Inauguration Day, re-christening the school back in November -- the first in the nation to do so.

For the students, it's music to their ears, gushed school principal Jean Bligen.

...

Experts say this baptizing phenomenon is unique to an incoming American leader riding a wave of optimism at the beginning of his presidency.

"This is highly unusual," said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of popular culture.

"Usually this thing doesn't take place until the president is out of office and often until the president has actually died."

But the "hope for some kind of utopia" during the Democratic Obama administration after eight years of Republican president George W. Bush has proven too powerful for some to wait, Thompson and others said.

Hope of freakin' utopia? You have to wonder how quickly the old names are going to return once the madness has subsided. No one could live up to this hype!

Speaking of which, Peggy Noonan offers similar cautions as she says the One has already reached saturation point with most Americans.

In the time since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has been on every screen in the country, TV and computer, every day. He is never not on the screen. I know what his people are thinking: Put his image on the age. Imprint the era with his face. But it's already reaching saturation point. When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common. I keep the television on a lot, and somewhere in the 1990s I realized that Bill Clinton was never not in my living room. He was always strolling onto the stage, pointing at things, laughing, talking.

Good reminder.