October 9, 2009
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?
Who else is confused by this?
President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a stunning decision that comes just eight months into his presidency.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it honored Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
The decision appeared to catch most observers by surprise.
The president had not been mentioned as among front-runners for the prize, and the roomful of reporters gasped when Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, uttered Obama’s name.
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34 Responses to “Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?”
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I think it’s interesting that the committee’s reasoning is based on how he has “captured the world’s attention.” Isn’t this the same as saying that he is a celebrity? Last time I checked out country was still in economic shambles. Let’s give him a prize for that! I wish we had a President, and not a celebrity…
I imagine a big help for Obama in this was the Vast relief of many in countries around the world to have anybody in the White House besides a violent nut case like W. This particular award has usually gone to people who produce a sense that peace is a possibility in a world that constantly thwarts such hopes. Look at the list of past winners and you will see many who were honored for initiatives that failed. In Obama’s case: who else has done as much this year to raise world hopes that many different people might finally be able to work together on a few very important things? I’m glad they awarded it to him.
wait. what?! I think this is going to be really bad. as if the batshitcrazy weren’t batshitcrazy enough.
Oh Christ this is a load of cock. I’ve just been steaming through a facebook thread about this. I have shit to do with my day. But really any way I look at this it is ridiculous. Sounds like what the folk crowd were trying to do to Bob Dylan in the early sixties. Give him some great big award and tell him he encapsulates their values and good boy, carry on.
Here’s what the batshit crazy will say:
“Sheee-it. Them Norwiggins like the sumbich so much why don’t thay take him on over thare? Everbody knows thay’re just fuckin with us because we have so much a better everything than they do. I cain’t see those bastards getting Raptured now. They blew it.”
Actually Daryl, a lot of people are criticising this. It quite annoys me when anyone who criticises Obama is considered mentally impaired. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.
Aren’t we making too much of it anyway? I’m neither here nor there in terms of, “did he deserve it.” But Al Gore one in 2007 for a similar reason, I think, he hadn’t ’sovled’ the climate change issue, but he had certainly helped change the discussion. This feels similar to me.
The President hasn’t fixed international relations, but he certainly changed the diplomatic climate.
My point was about the batshit crazy like Glenn Beck who will fire up the fringe about the vast conspiracy involving world leaders meddling in our affairs. I certainly don’t think everybody critical of this is a nut–but then, they tend to offer actual argument about their views. I can’t quite understand many of the objections: are there others who should have received it? (That’s always asserted to be the case.) Should there not be a Nobel Peace prize? Suits me to not have it if just stirs people up in ways that make them snap at everybody–including their fellows who share the priorities of peace. Also– Henry fucking Kissinger won it in 1973, so I’m not sure the thing has much credibility anyway.
So he’s being rewarded for just not being George Bush? I think ‘extraordinary efforts’ is a bit over the top, frankly. This is not about expecting him to achieve world peace in less than a year, but what the hell “cooperation between peoples” has he been heavily involved in, yet? He is symbolic. He represents something. This time Nobel has gone too far into rewarding hopeful intention than actual committed work. The Nobel prize is turning into a poem, which would be lovely if people didn’t take it so seriously.
Fucking explosives people. They ruin everything.
yeah, this is bad bad bad.
I’m confused by it. But pleased. I think it will help marginalize the radical right further AND push the Democratic right wing a bit to the left.
I hope so. I really hope so.
I guess I’m just very tired. I think we’re all fucked, and the Peace prize is a postage stamp lost in a high wind. What might happen! I’ll tell you: There will be wars and rumors of wars; there will be religions that like fire more than any heaven; there will be bigots gleeful about burning their own houses down to root out the bad people… I’m tired. I like Obama as a person might like a neighbor, and if my neighbor won a prize I would be happy to see him smile and I would wish him the best.
Except I think he’s more embarrassed and cagey than smiling. Aaron, I think your hopes are remarkably hopeful. But that’s what Obama’s got the award for, of course. Making everybody sit around hoping. People starve that way.
You see, when you really touch base with your feeling that we’re all fucked, everything starts to lighten up again. Hope is such an uptight emotion.
I guess I am not generally pleased by it. Don’t get me wrong, I hope he earns it, but I think this does more to harm the Nobel Peace Prize itself. Looking at it in context, it feels like a sham.
[...] You can see the clusterflock comments here. [...]
It seems to me that the Hope vs. the cynical let’s-find-a-way-to-always-be-right-about-how-bad-it-is conflict represents a level of personality variance that is always present. The question of what brings out the best in people and what the worst is often framed as one or the other, when we all have each. I don’t tend to instantly see hope as a sign that the hopeful are ignorant rubes who wallow in hope instead of actually doing anything. I don’t think that people get out in the streets in Iran to protest election results, for instance, because they don’t hope that some good may come of it. In short, I’m generally a very cynical person, and when I am hopeful that something might result in a little less suffering in the world–I don’t think I’m therefore sliding into the ignorant bliss of an emotional opiate.
Well I think there are probably more options than hope and cynicism, really. And I don’t think that hope was a necessary emotion in getting people out in the streets in Iran. I also don’t think of hope as an opiated state, either. It’s probably most often some condition of longing. I suppose I think it can often be part of an epiphany of uncovering a long-desired for outcome, and as such a gateway to a powerful emotional experience, but I think it’s vastly over rated as a force in changing things. People can simply be possessed of a powerful understanding that their values and history and the forces inside them compel them to challenge the status quo. Hope may or may not be involved in this, but it ain’t necessarily so.
And when I made that comment about touching base with your feeling that everything is fucked, well I suppose I don’t see the progressive way as bouncing away from that (which is what I think hope is, usually), but rather through it. If that is possible. Which is, like all ifs, a big one.
What Andrew Sullivan said strikes a chord with me.
Our Andrew points out all the people who were passed over and I think it would have been great for one of them to receive the award. Let’s face it, the world knows what President Obama is doing and saying; he doesn’t need anymore exposure.
I don’t know. It’s good and it’s bad. But i’m surprised by how passionate people are about the whole thing.
I’m Québécois and living in Taiwan, but I was pretty happy to hear the news. President Obama’s election was a momentous moment in American history. I think that Americans are confused why President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. Unlike President Carter in 2002, it’s not as clear cut.
Were their better potential laureates? Maybe, there were about 205 of them. It is also seen as a slap in the face to Mr. Bush and his warmongering polices. I don’t agree with Afghanistan and I don’t agree with the war on terror. That doesn’t mean that we should just let fanatics burn us to the ground. We should be mindful and invest in intelligence. America needs to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq has been invaded twice. Afghanistan has been in a perpetual state of war for decades.
Lucy, I suppose we are arguing definitions when it comes to hope and cynicism. For me, empty and harmful hope is that which makes a person do that instead of, say, taking the sick kid to a doctor. But I think there is a bad side of cynicism as well. How does one say, after all–I value nihilism? And if we are going to chastize a person for having too much or the wrong kind of hope, given the sad state of the world, doesn’t that proposition work the other way as well? Might someone say–there are people living in Gaza with no hope of ever finding a job or freedom from violence–and you’re cynical? In the end I think a degree of cynicism yields a more accurate view of the world and of what needs to be done. But often it is just bitterness, just as some hope is only a cocoon. I tend to see hope as simply the will to value anything enough to speak and offer support and to act selflessly when the need arises. I don’t want to walk about the world behaving as if all around me is nothing until it proves its worth to me.
Well, sure, but I’m not really arguing for any of that. I’ve never bought that business of “so you think you have a right to be unhappy when there are babies dying in the world?” kind of thinking, anyway. And I’m not much of a cynic. I do, however, believe that there are degrees of naivete, which, once divested, do not necessarily give way to cynicism. And I think this conversation is only in small part a discussion of definitions. I think this may be cultural. I don’t see Ireland’s history and struggle against oppression, for instance, as a struggle of hope. I see it as far more visceral than that.
Well it is always good when you can see the inherent worth in the world around you. That’s far more liberating than either hope or cynicism.
I didn’t say anything about hope in my comment. I said what I think or what I thought at the time I heard about the award. And I don’t particularly think that what I said was that implausible. It’s a bullshit award that carries a lot of weight in some of the circles of power that run things. At least they didn’t give it to Brangelina.
I hope Obama hangs brains in John Culberson’s face while issuing a rhyming ultimatum about how Congress is going to pass a bill creating single-payer health care system in the US or what he has in his briefcase will destroy us all.
I hope that Olestra is re-released in lard, goose fat, beef fat, and butter flavors without the anal leakage and cramping.
I hope thatt my student debt falls out of the computers it lives in never to be found again.
Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Those are good burgers, Dude.
Lucy– Our talk about the nature of hope and its relation to what does or doesn’t get done reminds me of a similar word I have bad feelings about: Faith. I hear that word all the time, and it’s often propped up by people who hold that objecting to it (in spite of what it actually means) renders one a shit-all & step in it person. People say–you have to have faith–and I’m always inclined to say: why not do something instead of sitting around having faith? Why not ask a question every once in a while? I’m beginning to think that this reaction is similar to the one you have in the presence of the word hope. When I think of “faith” in terms of the way I usually hear it, it means to me that a person has decided that actual evidence is just too hard to come by and too difficult to deal with–so why not just pick a view and fuck-all it’s my Opinion. man. Somebody might argue that we all have “faith” when we drive down a two-lane road and trust oncoming traffic to not swerve over and hit us head on. Maybe it’s faith that lets me make plans for the weekend that may never come. But that’s silly (with apologies to Hume); what the faith mongers mean when they make such arguments is that hoping to wake up in the morning is evidence of god. Hope. Faith. Beauty. All good unless you make a spread of them and then wait for bread to fall from the sky.
Deron: I am the walrus.
‘weet, ‘weet! Time out.
Hope vs. cynicism (and points in between and beyond) — that amounts to one (admittedly broad) topic.
The Nobel Peace Prize — well, that’s up (or down) there with the Academy Awards, the way I see it. Trends and priorities — well, they ebb and flow.
Henry Motherfucking Kissinger, as Daryl remarked.
I find it interesting with respect to what the predominant opinion an influential body of people opts to send to certain other bodies of people
FUCK FUCK FUCK! Trying to type and edit while yanking a dicey hand brake in a parking lot.
He’p me, somebody!
Wish it into the cornfield.
I prefer Italian crackers and a good olive oil, anyway.
As for meself, let’s just say “butt-fuck me without a kiss” and I’ll finish saying my piece once I am no longer sliding backwards in the parking lot of a big-box mega-store.
Story of my motherfucking life.
Oh Sheila–the BFM W/O a K comment is one I will keep, thank you. It does seem to fit the daily crossing of the concourse. Thank you. I’m now going to go grade some papers and kill some hopes.
Attaboy.