SkyFey | The Blog

I’m not given to writing “fan” letters, but today I was impelled to send this email to Charles Pierce, the Boston Globe staff writer whose one-paragraph satirical column, “Pierced,” appears every week in The Boston Globe Magazine:

Dear Mr. Pierce:
Your writing is always incisive, but today it was downright surgical - and when I read “…watching [Boston Mayor Tom Menino] deliver a speech is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a one-man pie fight,” I almost fell off my chair. (Granted, I have MS, so staying on a chair is often harder than falling off one, but still…)

“Pierced” is frequently my favorite piece in The Boston Globe Magazine, but this one was surpassingly good. And memorable: “One-man pie fight” is a descriptor that will assuredly accompany Menino’s name in story after story, right up to (and probably including) the poor mayor’s eventual obit.

Thank you!

(See “One-Man Show” for the rest of Pierce’s great column.)

Yeah, so presidential hopeful John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee. And this surprises you why?

He had no choice but to add a woman to his ticket. After the Democratic convention, Republicans were forced to recognize that the handwriting was on the wall: Voters are more than ready to listen to a younger, fresher voice. In addition, McCain and his cronies believe that there may be some former Hillary supporters who are on the fence about voting for a black man. Thus, they had to bring someone aboard who is both younger and female if they are to have any hope of garnering any presumptive swing votes.

Fortunately for the rest of us, however, this is a huge strategic mistake. Virtually every negative assertion that McCain’s camp has made about Barack Obama has been countered, both easily and effectively; the sole remaining claim that some found difficult to answer was the younger man’s age and relative inexperience. But now the Republican ticket’s own vice-presidential nominee is a former beauty queen — a self-styled “hockey mom” who (a) is three years younger than Sen. Obama; (b) has only been a governor (of an under-populated state, at that) for two years; and (c) prior to that was a small-town mayor!

McCain turned 72 years of age on the day he publicly named his running mate; if elected, he would be the oldest man ever elected to a first term as POTUS. He also has a history of cancer. Did he and his team choose to ignore the fact that, in McCain’s own words, the vice president must be qualified to step immediately into the presidency of the world’s greatest superpower?

I really believe McCain’s selection was a fatal error, and I love it.

(…and the perfect editorial cartoon lives here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/08_25_08_inktank/.)

This is not your grandfather’s USA. After too many years of Republicanism, our nation is now scorned worldwide. We are effectively bankrupt and we are saddling our children and grandchildren with debt in the trillions of dollars; we are mired in two tragically misguided and breathtakingly expensive wars; and we are “leading the world” only in the pace at which we’re destroying the planet. And the list goes on…

When people have complained to me that “Barack Obama is inspirational, but the job requires more than just hopeful talk,” I have insisted right along that what this country needs more than anything right now is precisely that: INSPIRATION. We are in such deep trouble that all the planning in the world will be useless without a real leader to inspire in us the will and the strength to do the hard work of recovery. And Sen. Obama’s acceptance speech last Thursday night struck a surpassingly perfect chord of both concrete plans and inspiration; it was both historic and transcendent.

I hope and pray that we will soon be able to call him President Obama.

A person who has had a stroke may experience dramatic (sometimes very negative) changes in his or her personality, but we don’t call those changes “mental” illness. Why, then, are depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, et al called “mental” illnesses?

The very decision to linguistically categorize these conditions as “mental” infers that they are “in or of the mind” — perhaps even “imaginary.” This usage can suggest that behaviors which develop from (or are exaggerated by) these disorders are caused by controllable errors in an individual’s thinking. That has led to a widespread sociocultural belief that “mental” illness is just symptomatic of a character defect or lack of restraint, and this has stigmatized terribly the individuals who suffer from any form of psychiatric illness.

(This was especially true in earlier generations. For example, my older daughter struggled most of her life with severe and frequently acute bipolar disorder, but my late father — an otherwise well-educated and cultured man who was the chief executive of a multi-national company — felt strongly that her problems were caused by insufficient discipline in my household. Unfortunately, that utterly wrong-headed notion is still seen today even among some younger people.)

I think I have a better idea . . . Read more »