I don't know about you but when I was growing up I always loved hearing the story of Cinderella. There was always something magical about it. It was more than Walter Mitty or Lee Iacocca — small-town boy made good. It was more than Prince Charles and Princess Diana in all their regal splendor long before Diana's untimely death.

It was like the triumph of the poor and the oppressed over the powerful and the arrogant — the quintessential example of the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It was the divine reversal in action as if God had actually written the story. It was liberation theology brought to fruition, the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie set in the context of a monarchial drama, an incredible conflation of political images. It was, in Reinhold Niebuhr'…