Not to cross streams with our lovely litterateur Elisa Albert, but I actually think the Swedish academy excelled this year. Doris Lessing is of a generation of postwar English novelists that I'd assumed had been forgotten entirely, not just by the prize syndicate but by the international readership. Now comes the unsurprising news that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. You can quibble that his minatory work on global warming hardly relates to "peace," but there is no doubt that his tireless advocacy has done a world, so to speak, of good:
“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in the statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”
I don't know about "spiritual," but the point is taken.
A cynic would be justified in saying that the committee in Oslo wanted to bury another rapier in the side of the sitting American president. Carter, ElBaradei, Gore: "Anybody But Bush" sounds about right.
Yet Gore has been an environmentalist far longer than Carter has been a champion of "stability" in the Middle East (it was his administration, after all, that coaxed Saddam Hussein into invading Iran); longer than ElBaradei has been going about, in his oh-so-multilateral way, atomic regulation. For once, then, it can truly be said that the Peace plaudit went to someone who has spent a lifetime earning it, rather than a mere election cycle. It's a day like today in which he must wonder if being the leader of the free world is all it's cracked up to be.
I take pleasure in the commentary on this blog, it really gives it that community sense!