Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.
WTF?
I’ve seen this happen in the movies. Sometimes there aren’t any good movies, and something has to win (1996: The English Patient). Sometimes the best movie can’t win because it is politically charged with the wrong message (2005: Brokeback Mountain). Often fluff will beat meat to a pulp (1994: Forest Gump over Pulp Fiction). Sometimes the best movie ever ever made by anyone anytime doesn’t win and I just don’t get it (1993: The Fugitive).
But then we have to remember – they are just movies and the award is just given out to help the movie business promote itself. A good movie is a good movie no matter the awards it receives. Right Harrison?
Michael Moore had the best line regarding Obama’s award, taken from the movie Saving Private Ryan. “Earn it.”
The Nobel prize, perhaps a penance for the man who gave us TNT, is often controversial. It carries with it quite a bit of money, and for scientists slaving over a microscope, that’s really important. For struggling writers, it’s a wonderful recognition of achievement in an immensely crowded field.
But for a president who took office based on loads of corporate cash and a slick advertising campaign? One who hasn’t done anything for world peace except make one of our imperial adventures more costly and deadly? Obama’s ad campaign was apparently so good it even worked on the Nobel Committee. (Obama won the coveted Advertising Age “Marketer of the Year ” award, beating out Apple, Nike, Zappos, Coors and John McCain. I’m not kidding.)
Henry Kissinger won the award in 1973. Well, half of it. The other half went to Le Duc Tho, Kissinger’s counterpart in peace talks. Remember that it was Kissinger who sabotaged the Paris Peace talks in 1968 to prolong the Vietnam War and allow Richard Nixon to win the White House. Remember that Kissinger and company (including the Reverend Billy Graham no less), seriously considered bombing the dikes in North Vietnam, and act that would have killed two million innocent people.
That’s some serious mayhem. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger (and Nixon’s personal spiritual adviser, The Reverend Graham) considered it appropriate.
And lord only knows what awaits the Afghans and Pakistanis as Obama guides the immense bull of an American military ship of state through their china shop. (I suspect Obama is merely a passenger on that ship, kept far way from the wheel.) His ratcheting up of tensions with Iran is being done like a stage play. Maybe the Nobel prize is for best actor?
It is important to remember, as Obama bows in humility to accept his prize that most often the Best Picture Award goes to artistic endeavors of no real import. Think of Rocky and Annie Hall and Titanic and (yikes!) The Sound of Music. And put Obama’s award on the mantle alongside these artistic masterpieces – a whole lot of talent and a very entertaining movie, and no substance beyond that.
At this point, Obama has earned exactly nothing. We hope for change.
Piece of Mindful 