Link of the Day: The Nobel Prize for Occasional Peace
When the news broke that President Obama won the Nobel Prize, I was too angry to write anything coherent about it. While the talking heads rushed to line up in partisan camps over the issue, there were plenty of people, I felt, who could have an opinion on the matter completely removed from petty politics. On its face, this read like an award given to a guy who makes pretty speeches, who isn’t George Bush and is beloved in Western Europe. This was like watching the prom king win a scholarship to Harvard, for no other reason than people just really dig the guy.
Luckily we have people like Matt Taibbi on the case. Taibbi’s writing can approach the deep end at times, and no wonder. While many of us, overwhelmed by emotion, need to take a step back before writing about issues that infuriate or sadden us, Taibbi seems to revel in getting as ginned up as possible before launching into prose over the latest round of ridiculousness to come out of Washington, Wall Street, or some other halls of power.
With that said, this was a tremendous read by a guy who gets it. Taibbi takes the Nobel committee to task for refusing to speak out against the Western war machine, even when the very name of the prize the committee hands out would seem to beg for a true believer in peace.
Whatever your political leanings, if you sometimes wonder if there’s another way to govern other than by bombing or threatening to bomb sovereign nations to smithereens, this is the read for you.
I agree with you that Taibbi has the right take here. It’s how I felt when I heard about the Obama Prize. I believe my facebook status was something along the lines of “So we’re still fighting two wars, right? And Guantanamo is still open? Just checking…” I read the New York Times and even supposedly left-leaning columnists like Friedman are talking about staying in Afghanistan for an undetermined, but long, amount of time and I despair. I look at this country’s long history of intervention in other countries, regardless of which political party is in charge and I get a little sick. The political spectrum in this country, and really in the contemporary West, is remarkably stunted and clustered around a few options. When the major debate in your country is about whether to fight one, two, or three wars at any given time it really makes you wonder if anything will ever change.
I sometimes think the best thing to happen will be the end of American economic dominance. Then we can stop messing around in the rest of the world and work on our own domestic issues in relative peace. The US has no more or less “responsibility” to go mucking around than anyone else. Ugh.
I also appreciate the heads-up about Taibbi’s blog. He can be infuriating, but he’s always entertaining.
I’m with you all the way, except for the part about Friedman being left-leaning.
Aside from the fact that left vs. right really doesn’t mean anything anymore when both sides are controlled by corporate interests and desperate to prove how brave they are by sending soldiers into harm’s way, Friedman is the biggest hawk (especially on the Middle East) that ever lived. Whent he Iraq War started, no one had a more reasoned argument for it than Friedman’s soothing statement, “SUCK…ON…THIS.”
But hey, Tom Friedman loves the environment. I’m sure he uses only his own hot air to power the city-sized Maryland mansion he lives in with his sugar-mama wife.