What is the world coming to? I mean, I can deal with the
idea that the Academy Awards, the Grammys, or even Cannes Film Festival juries base the selection process of awardees on
sympathies and politics, but a different thing --grossly offensive, if you ask
me-- is to realize that if you are a politician with a big name they give you a
Nobel Peace Prize; just for helping granny cross the street, or for winking at
Junior who’s sitting with his family at the table next to yours at McDonald’s.
And I am sure I’m
stepping on some toes here, but I don’t think that Barack Obama has done
anything to really deserve an award of that caliber. Yes I know, who said you need to do anything
to deserve it? But that only goes to
show, once again, how messed up this world is and how much politics affect more
and more things every day.
Even
Yasser Arafat
got a Nobel Peace Prize. But, on the other hand,
people like Mahatma Gandhi and Vaclav Havel were left out of the jackpot for no
convincing reason. And the latter two
were the real thing; they didn’t just play the part. They weren’t just two guys playing to be nice
or --even phonier-- savior, in the name of politics. They really walked the
line, in Johnny Cash’s sense of the phrase.
I don’t know, but
I just can’t buy the story of the politician with a messianic calling to save
the world. Actually, American Presidents
who play “good cop” always arise more suspicions in my already apprehensive and
conjecturing heart.
Bill Clinton is a
good example of the typical politician with the nice guy façade, since he has
always tried to present himself to people as just the middle-class regular-Joe. He plays saxophone, hangs around with the
boys, and cheats on his wife at the work-place; how much more common can you
get? But behind that front, there has
always been a huge apparatus of deception and sneaky tricky-dickiness; ask
Rwanda genocide victims of 1994 if you don’t believe me.
And we have another
Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the person of Al Gore: the man with the master
plan. They say that Albert Einstein was smart; well his legacy would look goofier
than Goofy if you compare it to Al
Gore’s, because this guy really came up with the perfect scheme to conquer the
hearts and wallets of the millions of believers that bought into the global
warming chimera. His “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary --followed by the book
with the same title-- has made him richer and richer as days go by, and even
earned him the title of the Eco-Messiah, while more evidence disproving Mr.
Gore’s “stance” keeps coming to the surface.
I am not saying
that those are the only examples --or the worse ones, for that matter-- of the
bad judgment behind the Nobel Peace Prize selection process; I’m just choosing
to mention the ones that have happened in my time. And I didn’t imply that all the selections
have been faulty ones either, since we have some fortunate instances of Nobel
Peace Prize winners in Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa, among a few
others.
As a conclusion
for this note, I would like to say that it is not a politically-biased point that
I’m trying to get across, since I consider myself a free-thinker (in the real
sense). And I don’t hate any of the men
I’ve mentioned, and much less for political reasons; I am just questioning the
integrity of some institutions --in this case the Nobel Prize committee-- and
the judgment they use to select awardees. One thing I can say though, as Mexican author Jose Gonzalez-Gonzalez put
it: “The better I get to know politicians, the more appreciation I have for my
dog.”
Note: This article appeared originally on a now
defunct online magazine, and I wrote it on account of Obama’s Nobel Prize.
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