JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It’s not been a pretty history for the Peace Prize.

At least, Obama gave the world something to celebrate and have some hope about.

Does anyone remember that he replaced the most ignorant and vicious man ever to hold the office? The world was morally exhausted after eight years of that cretin.

A man who killed maybe a million people?

The Peace Prize in general has an odd history and is surely the most ambiguous and inconsistent of prizes.

I think Al Gore’s prize was more than a little odd.

Well, then there’s the just plain shameful horrors of the prize.

Henry Kissinger, certified war criminal?

Menachim Begin, old Irgun terrorist?

Shimon Peres, political father of Israel’s nuclear weapons?

Theodore Roosevelt, imperialist extraordinary?

A few awards in recent decades meant something for sure, as that to Doctors without Borders or that to Jimmy Carter.

But, in general, it’s not a proud history.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Prizes generally are foolish business.

Even the most prestigious – the Nobel – often gets it wrong. Just look at the winners in literature. The authors loved and read often are not on the list. Those on the list include those few read. In science even we find things like Einstein having won for one of his lesser contributions, not relativity.

The Peace Prize is compromised beyond meaning with several leaders whose hands are very bloody receiving it, all in the hope one presumes of influencing the course of events.

The Academy Award is just silliness, although people like it for exactly that reason. Goofy gowns, goofier speeches, and Fred Astaire glitter.

Some terrible films have won. Just recall Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8, an unwatchable, bad movie, even in its day. And then there are the fad films – Dances with Wolves – which are heaped with prizes despite being good but not original work.

The Pulitzer is the most hopeless prize of all. It has not only got it wrong many times, it has been hopelessly compromised by crooked journalists and crooked newspapers. A New York Times correspondent in Russia in the early part of the century we now know won for totally created material. And there have been more scandalous examples in recent decades. The prize has a flag-waving agenda that has nothing to do with quality or ideas or even journalism.

Just consider the oleaginous laureate Thomas Friedman, a man whose job is to rewrite Pentagon material and other imperial propaganda into chirpy copy.

With history books, it has often missed great books while giving awards to second-rate or boring work.

Just consider the odd idea that there must be a best each year in anything. It just isn’t so. Creativity and genius don’t follow clocks or calendars.

Science for example progresses steadily but often with spectacular work only coming after years or decades.