"Tax collectors in Ancient China and Ancient Rome routinely enriched themselves by gaming the system. This systemic abuse has made tax collectors a target of societal hatred throughout history."
I'm not sure that we necessarily want to celebrate the people. I think that we want to have a certain respect for the office... But by celebrating all of them, I do think it causes us to think of the president as somehow other, when in reality they are a citizen just like everyone else.
Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance," the journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote in The Atlantic in 1872. He was annoyed by "all the barking ... and there is a good deal of it." Other New Yorkers feared that the dogs roaming the streets were "deleterious to health..." Anxieties escalated to the point that "weakminded people began to look upon Ponto's kennel in the back yard as a very Pandora's box of maladies too numerous and appalling to be contemplated without terror.
Plato's allegory of the cave showcases how even philosophers who disparage imagination depend on it; they instruct us to 'picture' the shadowy lives.