The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
If you offer athletes stipends, then you’re into pay-for-play, and that’s the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn’t in tennis. It wasn’t in the Olympics. And it’s not in big-time college sports. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
In 1989, my father died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. All four of his siblings followed him into the shadow lands of that fascinating, maddening affliction. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
According to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be ‘above politics.’ He wasn’t elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an avatar of American tolerance. His attempts to get himself reelected imply a certain, well, ingratitude. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer’s because it attacks the two things most central to a writer’s craft – language and memory, which together make up an individual’s identity. Alzheimer’s makes a new character out of a familiar person. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimer’s – and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you – is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels. Charlie Pierce Read Quote