Obama's Nobel

Some years ago a columnist friend was devastated to learn that the Pulitzer Prize committee had chosen her for journalism's most coveted award, only to be overruled by the Pulitzer board, which has the final say. I attempted to console my friend by pointing out that ultimately all prizes represent the fallible judgments of fallible humans; that Pulitzers had often been bestowed upon work that was not only undistinguished but sometimes dead wrong; and that the quality of her past columns would be unaffected by her winning or losing the Pulitzer prize.

"You've sat on prize juries," I reminded her. "You know it's all a political game."

"You don't understand!" she wailed. "Once you win a Pulitzer, you can write your own ticket!"

Barack Obama this month found himself in the opposite situation: suffering the embarrassment of winning a Nobel Peace Prize that he never applied for and that no one seems to think he deserves.

Of course it is of passing interest that the Nobel committee celebrated Obama's likely positive potential influence on world peace but somehow overlooked the genuine achievements of Mohandas Gandhi, the past millennium's single most effective practitioner of non-violent passive resistance. But the more germane question, it seems to me, is: So what?

At the end of the day, awards— Nobels, Pulitzers, Oscars, Barrymores, baseball's Hall of Fame, whatever— are simply political gestures or promotional gimmicks; they recognize past achievements but don't improve them. Ultimately the purpose of government, business and even the arts is to deliver services to clients, not to win awards. So why should you or I buy into the notion that awards are important?

Streisand, but not Haym Salomon?

The National Museum of American Jewish History recently announced the first 18 members of its "American Jewish Hall of Fame," a class that includes Sandy Koufax, Steven Spielberg and Barbara Streisand but managed to omit Haym Salomon, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Adolph Ochs, Saul Bellow, Jacob Schiff, William Levitt, the Sears Roebuck patriarch Julius Rosenwald, the TV and radio pioneer William S. Paley and, yes, Joseph Pulitzer himself. When an Inquirer writer questioned these oversights, the museum's president, Michael Rosenzweig, indignantly replied that admission to this pantheon "was never a popularity contest."

Oh? Pray tell, if such awards aren't popularity contests, what are they? The word of Jehovah, handed down from Mount Sinai? Sally Field was more to the point in her 1985 Academy Award acceptance speech: "You like me, right now, you like me!"

When Bill Russell led the University of San Francisco basketball team to the national championship in 1955, sportswriters in the Bay area nevertheless awarded their Player of the Year trophy to Ken Sears, a white center from Santa Clara whose team had finished third in its conference. As the All-America player (and later U.S. Senator) Bill Bradley recently observed, Russell could have perceived this snub as an outrageous insult with racial overtones. Instead he concluded that awards were "political," whereas winning was totally under the control of the players and their coach. Consequently, while other players focused on winning awards, Russell became "an even more focused team player." That's my kind of guy.

Pundits' advice to Obama

The rationale for Obama's Nobel Peace Prize struck me as less intriguing than the Europhobic reactions it provoked among many American pundits.

—Ross Douthat in the New York Times (Oct. 11) urged Obama to reject the Nobel in order to "establish himself, definitively, as an American president— too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug."

—Times columnist Thomas Friedman, himself a Pulitzer Prize winner (for commentary), urged Obama (Oct. 10) to "accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world's most important peacekeepers."

— The syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, in the Inquirer (Oct. 19), suggested that to believe Obama deserves his Nobel, "you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International)…."

—Not to be outdone, Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger (Oct. 14) cited Obama's "Nobel of political decadence" as proof that "Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe."

"When it was a vibrant garden of ideas," Henninger explained, "Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state." From there, Henninger tells us, the whole degenerate continent has discovered "that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions."

Two bold ideas

That's one way to look at Europe today. But to my mind, something new and very exciting is taking place in Europe these days. Europeans have confronted two of the hardest questions in human governance. As a result they have collectively embraced two bold, risky and intriguing ideas that have never before been attempted on such a broad scale in the planet's history.

The first is a rejection of military force as an effective means of achieving national or human goals. The second is a rejection of supernatural religion as an effective means of explaining the universe.

These twin experiments are barely in their infancy; it may take centuries to transform pacifism and rationalism into pragmatic philosophies for regulating human behavior. But a thousand years from now, I suspect, people will look back on these times in Europe the way we now look back on the first stirrings of the Reformation or the birth of democracy in 1776.

Will such efforts win somebody a Nobel Prize? As I said, who cares?♦


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