God is not dead, according to research on fast-growing world religions and to believers everywhere.

"DONALD TRUMP IS AT WAR WITH GOD," read the news crawl on a TV screen in the skyway system Wednesday in downtown Minneapolis.

On closer inspection, I realized I'd seen it wrong (though such a war did seem like the candidate's logical next step). Trump is really only at war with the GOP, which we all knew. Still, the mistaken juxtaposition bolstered another thought that's been rattling in my head: Live long enough, and you'll see yourself become the villain.

The notion was first planted when I stumbled across a TV showing of "The Dark Knight," the 2008 movie in the "Batman" franchise during which something along those lines — pondering the staying power of a heroic image — is uttered, particularly with respect to the character of Harvey Dent/Two-Face, the district attorney turned embittered criminal.

So consider, then, Gene Simmons, the 66-year-old bassist of the glam-rock group KISS who's receiving what is surely his first and last reference on the opinion pages of the Star Tribune. I recall as a kid picking up a drugstore magazine that profiled Simmons during his late 1970s/early '80s phenom-demon prime, detailing his breakfast routine as if he were a god or something.

Anyway, Simmons got into a social-media war this week with the rapper and actor Ice Cube over what constitutes rock 'n' roll. It was occasioned by the induction of Ice Cube's group N.W.A. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Rap isn't rock, Simmons protested. (I'm paraphrasing.)

Rock isn't a style of music but a spirit, Ice Cube responded — it's been going on since blues, jazz, bebop, soul.

Let me know when it's a two-way street and you let Jimi Hendrix into the hip-hop Hall of Fame, Simmons spat back "respectfully" (but with the hint of a "you-people" tone).

"We invent it. Y'all reprint it," replied Ice Cube, owning that tone.

Thus passes the baton — although Ice Cube is no newcomer to the intersection of good and evil. Simmons, meanwhile, has evolved from celebrated bad boy into cranky old man, unmasking more of himself than perhaps he should have.

Still, maybe the "Batman" movie had it wrong. Maybe you can become the villain without ever intending to go bad.

Witness Bill Clinton, who's long held a sort of rock-star status for many in the black community — so much so that on last weekend's "Saturday Night Live," Kenan Thompson, in character as the Rev. Al Sharpton, mocked that Clinton could "walk into the BET Awards after-party, sit at Rihanna's table and order up a bowl of mac 'n' cheese, and everybody would say, 'That seems right.' "

Yet the ramifications of the 1994 crime bill signed by then-President Clinton certainly didn't seem right to the Black Lives Matter protesters who disrupted his appearance last week at a campaign rally for his wife. Though Clinton responded vigorously in its defense, the legislation is thought in the harsh light of history to have been responsible for the mass incarceration of African-Americans.

Besides having to answer for this in her campaign, Hillary Clinton has her own problems with being a standard-bearer. She was in the vanguard of the feminism of her era, but the young women voting for Bernie Sanders aren't impressed. And when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and feminist icon Gloria Steinem tried to rebuke the younger crowd for this, they only succeeded in cementing themselves as old-guard.

Now, all of the aforementioned people actively court public attention, so perhaps sympathy for them should be limited. But there are also those in public service who proceed with a quieter dedication, yet are thrust into controversy by circumstance.

I'm talking about Mike Freeman. The longtime Hennepin County attorney doesn't have the sort of familial nor political pedigrees that one would associate with injustice, yet in the days following his decision not to charge two Minneapolis police officers in the shooting of an unarmed black man, Jamar Clark, he's been accused of abuses ranging from using racially coded "dog-whistle" language to silencing black voices.

There are fair questions about whether Freeman made the right call, and society ultimately will be better for engaging in introspection about latent, let alone blatant, racial bias. In this year's America, it would be hard to argue that neither exists. Still, debate on both sides in the Clark case has embraced certainty where there is ambiguity and has assumed the worst motivations in people rather than the possibility of honest intent.

There's a connective tissue to these disparate items I'm mentioning. It can be found in a post this week by James Fallows at TheAtlantic.com, which discusses (as the headline puts it): "A 2-Year-Old Article About an 87-Year-Old Book, With New Relevance for the Here and Now."

The book is "The Revolt of the Masses," by Jose Ortega y Gasset, published in 1929. The two-year-old article, published by the Daily Beast, was from Ted Gioia, who wrote: "The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age — or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elite still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention."

This is plainly evident in the Trump phenomenon. It's also found in the protests of Occupy and Black Lives Matter. It's evident anywhere idealism and grievance have welled up and the hard work of resolution has barely begun. Ahead is old-school maneuvering: craftwork and calibration, compromise and concession, all to be greeted with disdain, and on it goes.

But that's easy for me to say from my 13th-floor perch in a downtown skyscraper — as part of the establishment. Not sure how that happened.

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For more about research on world religions, see the Opinion Exchange column by my colleague D.J. Tice this coming Sunday. For more on the Ortega book, start at http://tinyurl.com/zq8qsul. For more on Donald Trump, look anywhere and everywhere. For more on God, I've been told, look within.

David Banks is at David.Banks@startribune.com.