Judging from the influx of letters to the editor about my column, every single one of you missed me very much over Fall Break. I can’t blame you, it was a big week.
In particular, it was a big week for Nobel Prizes.
The biggest story in Nobel-land, as we all know, is Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus earning the nod for Duke commencement speaker. That position has been dominated in recent years by speakers an average reader would consider not terribly difficult to nab. The last four years’ speakers: former Duke professor John Hope Franklin, Duke alumnus Rick Wagoner, Barbara “If anybody has any doubts about this speaker, people should go read more books” Kingsolver and godmother of a graduating Duke student Oprah Winfrey.
Yunus is both bringing a fresh face to Duke’s commencement address and an important legitimacy to the Nobel Peace Prize by speaking at Duke. Because, honestly, how serious can a prize be if its recipients are rarely invited to speak at Duke?
Oh—oh, yeah. The other news about the Nobel Peace Prize. It went to that a skinny kid with a funny name.
We’ve heard the standard fare about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. We know that Arizona State University didn’t find him qualified for an honorary degree, even though if you’re from the left coast, they admitted your idiot neighbor Dirk who ate dog crap for $5 during high school. And that’s now even more ironic in light of blah blah blah.
(On an unrelated note: Really, ASU? The biggest party school in the country. Notre Dame gave him an honorary degree, for Pete’s sake. What the hell is wrong with you?)
We’ve heard from angry conservatives blowing alternately hot and cold, fluctuating between the standard “HE HASN’T DONE ANYTHING MRAH MRAH MRAH” and “IF THE NORWEGIANS LIKE HIM HE MUST BE A SOCIALIST…. MRAH MRAH MRAH.” Conservatives are very loud, hence the all-caps. Also into guttural sounds, hence the “mrahs.”
Equally unintelligible are the streams of syllables from super-liberals, usually including something about Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. References to that one particularly subversive lesbian Portuguese subsistence farmer are optional.
Personally, I’m less upset that he won the Nobel and more upset that he won the wrong one. If you’re going to pick on potential, it’s hard to argue that Obama wouldn’t be a better chemist than Venkatraman Ramakrishnan if he really put his mind to it.
Plus, I’m pretty sure by the time you read this, Obama will have been awarded the prize in economics as well, “for his Cash for Clunkers program.” Not fair to double-award.
When groups of people as disparate as the Taliban and Glenn Beck agree, it makes you wonder: Is anybody other than Rahm “Oslo is better than *!$?#@ Copenhagen” Emanuel and the Norwegian Nobel Committee really on board with this? Or are we actually watching the Nobel Committee devolve into something more like the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee? Can this really be the least popular Nobel pick of all time? We should at least look at some of the other people who got Nobel Prizes.
Al Gore. Tennessee’s favorite son nabbed a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He compares favorably to Obama: they both won Democratic presidential primaries and, you’ll remember, the popular vote in a presidential election. I think most of the reason people are cool with a Nobel for Gore and not Obama (no, Kanye, it’s not racism) is that Gore also won an Emmy and an Oscar, in addition to a Grammy. Obama has only won a Grammy, and that means old Alfie Nobel would be lonely on Obama’s mantle, but not Gore’s.
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. They were awarded the Prize in 1994 for not solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains not solved to this day. Although they did not come under fire for just trying to solve problems like Obama is, my take is that people don’t care because Arafat is so popular among conservative circles in America.
Ludwig Quidde. Who could forget Ludwig Quidde?
Don’t get me wrong—I’m with all of you in scratching my noggin over this one. But despite what people from all sides of the aisle are shouting unintelligibly, Obama might not be history’s absolute worst winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Just add that to the list of his accomplishments.
While I generally agree with the apes and walruses (Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, respectively) who fill our cable news programming on this being a pick out of left field, I think we might be forgetting that Obama may not be the absolute worst Nobel laureate of all time. Just add it to the list of things less competitive than an ASU degree.
Charlotte Simmons won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1968 for her pioneering work with lesbian Portuguese subsistence farmers.
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