Frank

So, Al Gore's trophy collection grows ever more impressive. In addition to his Oscar statue and what is an undoubtedly endless catalogue of merit badges, our former Vice President now lays claim to the Nobel Peace Prize. So let the grousing begin.

Friday night, I asked my wife how long she supposed it might take the collective conservative punditry machine to begin telling us that the Nobel Committee is just another liberal elitist, European, American-hating institution, and that Gore's award is only further proof of this assertion. The answer came in Saturday's NYT letters to the editor.

Granted, letters from readers aren't exactly "punditry" in and of themselves, but they often seem to be reflections of punditry. I'm not sure what the odds are that any given NYT reader would just happen to mimic the word-choice of talk radio personalities like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, but I imagine I'd have to hire a mathematician to find out.

At any rate, of the six letters reprinted, at least two were decrying either the worthlessness of the award, Gore's claim to it, or both. In one of the more eloquent effigies:

To the Editor:

Mother Teresa not only talked the talk, but she also walked the walk for her Nobel Prize.

Al Gore walks the walk and rides on his atmosphere-polluting private jet to his energy-consuming estate to win a Nobel Prize given for his work with global warming. Sheer hypocrisy.

The Nobel Peace Prize has evolved into a forum for a political statement and away from any real meaning. It is but a mere feel-good experience for the monied elite and aristocracy of the world perpetuating its flawed and politically correct stance. It's sad.

Bill Steiner
Omaha, Oct. 12, 2007

So here we have all the classic elements essential to the conservative complaint:

-Reference to Gore's hypocritical use of both modern transportation and the conventional electrical power grid.
-Complaints of the "monied elite and aristocracy," truly the trademark of leftists around the world. Fucking Che Guevara.
-General distaste for "political statements"
-Contrasting reference to noted Catholic/woodland gnome Mother Teresa.

What piqued my interest was the idea that either Gore himself has devalued the award, or that the award itself has been on a downhill slide for some time now.

I'm not, as they say, a Nobel scholar. The only bookmarks of oddity in the Peace Prize's history that I'm immediately aware of are the aforementioned Teresa's award in 1979 for her work in India, and that Babylonian whore Henry Kissinger, having jointly received the Prize in 1973 with Le Duc Tho, who had the good sense to decline the award.

So, to the Internet--simultaneous savior of the research-exhausted and entertainer of the drug-addled--for what I'm willing to assume (for the sake of a blog post, anyway) is an accurate account of the Prize's history.

In 2006, the prize went to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, for their work to alleviate poverty through the use of micro-loans (also known as "micro credit"). On the economics side, it's easy to see why conservatives might not be particular fans of the Nobel Committee. Most of the economic actors who have received the prize have addressed poverty and suffering through mechanisms which are basically either socialist, or fairly close to it. The Wal-Marting of the 3rd world, it ain't.

In 2005, the prize went to Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (or IAEA-EIEIO). Bushies of the world are still pissed at him--along with UN inspector Hans Blix--for not "finding" the WMDs in Iraq and being fairly egalitarian regarding Iran's claim to nuclear energy. Again, not winning any points from W.F. Buckley's side of the room.

2004 & 2003, a couple'o people for "sustainable development, democracy and peace" and "democracy and human rights." Let me save El Rushbo a breath and just say, "liberal bullshit."

2002: Jimmy Carter. To quote Ol' Dirty Bastard...

2001: Kofi Annan & the U.N.

Getting the picture? It just goes on and on like this, one left-leaning handjob after another.

What's really interesting, though, is 1972. You know who won the Prize that year? Nooooooo... body. Think about that for a second. You, as a member of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, scour the earth for good news, and at some point you just say, "Fuck it." This, to me, helps explain 1973's choice (Kissinger, for "brokering peace" in Vietnam, four years after he illegally subverted the exact same peace deal so that Nixon could gain an edge in the presidential election)--I look at it as a sort of rhetorical statement for its time: "People, we are in such bad shape, that we have floundered beneath the baseline of human decency. Last year, we tried to show you that there was no one deserving of a prize for their efforts of peace. This year, things have gotten worse. They're not just bad. They're Henry Kissinger bad."

Seriously--how bad do things have to be to give the award to a man like this? Granted, in 1973, the extent of his deviousness was not so thoroughly documented as it has since become, but come on, people--evil has a smell. It's a smell you can smell. Before we had Axe Body Spray, we had Henry Kissinger.

So... do I believe Gore deserves this Prize? Meh. He's worked hard, for no apparently self-serving reason. He could certainly have spent the time endlessly wallowing in his sorrows, as he surely had claim to, following the electoral debacle of 2000; but he chose instead to educate people as best he knew how about something he seems to genuinely care about. Do I think he fairly beats the Buddhists of Myanmar, who endlessly, fearlessly subjected themselves to repeated imprisonment and ass-beatings in order to call national attention to a brutal and oppressive government regime? Not especially.

But listen--Myanmar? Buddhists? Self-sacrifice? Democracy?

That's just not our thing.