Friday, October 09, 2009

The Nobel What?!

In a brazen attempt to give people on the Internet something stupid to bitch about for the next week or so, the Nobel Prize committee has awarded a Nobel Peace prize to Barack Obama. In a statement, they said the prize was awarded not because of what he has done, necessarily, but because of his great potential to do good things. They assert that it is not a popularity contest, a claim loudly supported by recent prize winner, Megan Fox. In a related story, the Academy Awards have nominated Obama for Best Director and Best Film (not yet made) for the following comments he made while watching Transformers 2: "Oh! You know what would be a really great movie? Zombies versus robots!"

People will say that the Nobel Prize is now just about PR; but the Nobel Prize was actually created as PR for Alfred Nobel, and it must have worked- when was the last time you heard anyone complaining about the "merchant of death" Alfred Nobel? Of course, giving it to Obama to encourage him to deserve winning one in the future is pretty freakin' rediculous. He should politely turn it down. Sadly, it also means listening to two weeks of one group of people saying, "He won it because he's such a transformative figure. He has genuinely transformed the meaning of succeeding into 'maybe, possibly succeeding in the future without taking any actual risks'!" And then there will be the other, louder group saying, "The Nobel Prize is a fraud! He just won because the rest of the world are commies, and real Americans don't care what the rest of the world thinks about us!"

In my experience, Americans care more than anyone on earth what the rest of the world thinks of them. And, actually, in my experience, the people from "the rest of the world" who bitch the most about America tend to have in their mind the most overblown and unrealistic idea of the potential greatness of America, which they clearly want to pin to Barack Obama. Things could be worse, and it would be pretty stupid to growl, "Screw them for liking us!" Also, when it comes to foreign policy, I do actually agree with the Nobel committee that the US has a great chance now to correct an approach that was stupid, counterproductive, outdated, and went very much astray in recent years; although to be honest, I've been most impressed thus far by what Hillary Clinton has done in those regards. Again, the President should probably make a very polite and eloquent speech turning down an award that he hasn't yet earned. And I am really glad to be spending the next few days in the Canadian wilderness away from all media, especially the Internet.

Lastly, obviously robots would win.

2 comments:

Greg von Winckel said...

You can't take this too seriously. Hell, they gave one to Kissinger.

Rufus said...

Yeah, I think my response to the news was actually more like, "eh, so what!".

The funny thing is Gandhi was nominated five times but never won.