*Image courtesy of New York Times

Make Hawaii a state so Obama can be elected American president… The Birthers finally unravel this mess we’re in, in 2011…

Conspiracy theories interest me primarily because they reveal so much about human nature. They show our need to know what can’t be known, even if we have to invent what can’t be known. As a species we are so evolved, we have time to worry about parallel universes, heaven and hell, and, of course, President Barack Obama’s birthplace.

Meanwhile, Rome burns.

The Birther phenomenon is really no surprise. Obama is black.

A chunk of America woke up the morning after the election, opened the morning newspaper and said, “What the hell?” Everything they knew about the world had changed overnight. They wanted a Mulligan. They wanted to rewind the tape. They wanted it to be 1958 again.

Of course, there are reasons for white Americans to wish for peaceful, profitable, likeable 1958 . But they were stuck with 2008, a Black president, a sour and uncertain economy, two wars, three-dollar gas, bad cholesterol, and diminishing returns on everything. Yes, and the designated hitter. Read more…

Photo by Tim Umphrey/Getty Images

Zack Greinke suffers from social anxiety. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Let’s put it another way. Zack Greinke has social anxiety. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a little less ominous; a little less sky-is-falling. But I think we can do better.

Zack Greinke lives with social anxiety. Yeah, that’s better.

It sounds trivial to say it that way, but it almost feels like you have to. It feels like you have to remind the general public every now and again that a mental disorder doesn’t mean you belong in a padded room or in a therapist’s office five days a week. Some disorders can get out of control and be debilitating to the point that a person can actually “suffer” from it, but in the case of one of the top 10 pitchers in the world, it’s safe to assume he’s not suffering.

So let us all stop referring to it like it’s a negative, like it’s a chink in his character. It’s not.

What it does do, however, is make Greinke a recognizable figure in the sports world. “Hey, there’s that guy who quit baseball because he’s loony.” (Sorry New York fans, that’s just not the case, either.) He’s become That Guy with That Thing that causes him to quit something everybody wishes they could do.* He’s a mental midget, a 5-cent head and is unable to deal with pressure and winning, and he’ll always be that way.

*Another disgusting side of this issue is Joe Fan projecting his envy and his own regret onto another person because he never made it as far. It happened last year when Royals prospect Danny Duffy “quit” because he thought he just didn’t want to play baseball anymore. Joe Fan was quick to call him a “quitter” and a fool, that he would someday regret this decision. How is it of any concern to anyone if another person chooses to play baseball or not? How is it that a medically diagnosed mental disorder makes you out to be somehow less than? Read more…