For most of human history young boys with big dreams have been inspired by heroes upon whom to base their lives, their intentions, their methodologies — a St. George to slay the dragon, a Peter to plug the dike, or a David to upend whatever Goliath threat is the order of the day.

In our manic and mechanized age, these icons have mostly been shrunken into trendy entertainment superstars, who are all the rage one day and consumed by scandal the next, or sports champions who gleam with excellence in their childish pursuits before the wheels of time erase them from the public mind, and the demands of life reveal our misplaced passions to be counterproductive fantasies that reduce our lives to inane irrelevance.

Since at any time in history there are always wars, there have always been heroes overcoming impossible odds and fierce enemies — Leonidas at Thermopylae, Paul Revere at Concord, or a thousand other nameless faces neglected by history. But lately many people have noticed that we don't hear about real heroes anymore, and the genuine ones we do possess, like Pat Tillman, are usually betrayed and destroyed by the very false causes they espouse.

Most of our 20th century heroes were imbued in our minds by the silver screen, often — like Sgt. York or Audie Murphy — in stories beefed up by scriptwriters to less report their jaw-dropping exploits and more provide an entertainment lure to profit from the sale of tickets.

Or, they are totally imaginary, fictional creations usually played by Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzeneggar to make us believe things that never really existed and events that never really happened in the way they are portrayed as happening.

Or even worse than that, the men who control our minds turn the real heroes of the world into vile criminals to be exterminated or imprisoned — think of Eugene Debs, Adolf Hitler, Muammar Qaddafi or Bradley Manning. And in that process of turning the good into bad and the bad into good, they elevate warped souls like Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley into saintly status.

A less widely realized phenomenon on today's Internet is the prohibition of the word "Jew" in stories about our troubles. Anybody who uses that word is widely regarded as a deranged criminal across the majority of superficial society.

And those who abstain from naming the terrible tribe behind the multiplicity of disasters find success and wealth while they actually serve in the coverup of the real cause of all our problems. Any story that fails to mention that freighted word "Jew" in its description of whatever event it describes is actually participating in the deception that keeps the criminals safe from retribution.

"The man who wasn't there" was the title of a movie made a decade ago by two Jewish brothers who slightly changed their names. A wonderful cast of accomplished actors performed a script of hopelessness and ennui in which no hero was to be found.

Not only has everyone noticed that, at least in the movies, admirable heroes have been replaced by the masochistic realism of flawed anti-heroes, but that, in real life, characters promoted as worthy of inspired emulation too often turn out to be chimerical impostors, when you lift up the rock of the real story and observe the worms crawling beneath the hype of the Hollywood script.

Seemingly no matter where you turn in these demented days — Ron Paul, Lance Armstrong, or Barack Obama — our heroes aren't so heroic once the greasy facts reveal the manufactured fraud in their breathlessly promoted but utterly falsified legends.

Particularly in these recent years of contrived disasters and pointless attacks on defenseless people, the hero we all hoped to save us from our troubles is consistently and conspicuously absent, and those who pretend to be our champions invariably turn out to be our exploiters.

Our highest hopes are permanently dashed by the scams that have deceived us. These scams always possess the kosher stamp of cynicism and irrational hopelessness infused into the slanted descriptions of them that most people accept as gospel truth. They seldom make the connection that this is why they are so depressed.

You only have to contemplate the bizarre actions of New York City Mayor Bloomberg banning food contributions from FEMA shelters because they might not be of sufficient nutritional value for starving survivors of his disaster-ravaged city — or think about the many dangerous medicines that doctors promote as good for us, or why they won't reopen the question of the bogus 9/11 story — to fully comprehend what I'm saying.

There are no widely recognized public heroes in our modern mongrel world, only poseurs pretending to be our champions who invariably are hooked into some kind of exploitative Ponzi scheme. As a result, it has become impossible to trust our friends, or even ourselves, because so much false information has been inserted into our minds that we can't make reliable decisions about anything of importance, judging by the track record of recent deceptive events.

No heroes will rise up to save us from these disasters we have unwittingly approved by our inattention and focus on meaningless matters. And judging by the lack of preparations we have made for the imminent disasters that now befall all of us, we can't even trust ourselves to safely reckon what is about to happen to us all.

One sensational story after another details one threat or another, but in all of them, there are no solutions mentioned in any of them, only more things to worry about, more poisons to avoid, more betrayals soon to afflict us.

And as we wait in vain for some champion to ride in and save us, the growing realization gnaws away at the last of our hopes, that if we don't act today to save ourselves, nobody else is ever going to do it for us.

Precisely the kind of man who is the subject of the thrilling tales of yesteryear is exactly who we need now to ride in and straighten things out. But the man who wasn't there isn't here, and as far as I can tell, isn't due any time soon.

We don't have real men any more, only shysters looking for an angle as long as it's safe to do so, which, I guess, is why so many writers on the Internet use pen names that tell us more about who they really are than anything they could possibly write.

Be sure about one thing. Almost everything you have learned and think you know is not true, and that no one can save you from your false perceptions except yourself.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 250 N. McCall Rd. #2, Englewood FL 34223 USA.