Ethics and morality are neither universal nor timeless. What is universal is the need for heroes and people to look up to. In older countries, we have a plethora of of heroes, both mythical and historical, some of whom actually lived up to their hype!

By contrast, of course, America has no history to speak of. The Native American heroes were erased and American exceptionalism does not allow veneration of European figures. Thus your only heroes are persons from your brief history or spandex-clad fictional metahumans. Unfortunately, because your 'history' is still (by European standards) current affairs, rather too much is known about what your historical heroes were really like, which ends up tarnishing them.