How Soon is Now? Obama's Nobel Prize

You often wonder how you will react to certain moments in life. Will you fumble for words, stand tall, give in to your swirl of emotions, or treat it as another incident in some sort of long-running cosmic joke? I really do not know what to say about the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. He has had such an incredible run of luck over the past few years that it seems as though nothing could exceed his grasp. And Europe has proven this to be true by awarding him the ultimate humanitarian award. But has someone exceeded their wishful thinking? Can anyone make sense of this?

Apparently, the US president was woken up before 6am to be told the news of the prize. His aides informed him; he informed his family. When his daughters were informed of this, eleven-year-old Malia was reported to have said, "Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize. And it is Bo's birthday!" You remember that Bo is the dog Obama promised and gave his daughters after he won the election. It seems important to mention another trivial event in the context of the laureateship, since both will become just another news item in the wash of media coverage. Let's just hope that these issues are not given the same weight.

And does anyone believe that the Nobel committee never makes a mistake about who receives their medals? As a devoted reader and lover of literature, I have to wonder about what motivates those Scandinavians. Joyce, Tolstoy, Conrad, Woolf, Twain, Updike and many other now famous writers were denied the laurel crown (and note that I only had to mention their last names to get you intrigued about their exclusion from the club). In peace, it is true that some great people and groups have been justly lionized and memorialized (Mandela, King, Doctors without Borders, etc.); others have been unjustly ignored (Gandhi is often lamented as an also-ran who never received the prize); and many others have left many heads shaken in disbelief (Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Mother Teresa - read Christopher Hitchens's work on her "real" career). This is a group of people who make a lot of mistakes. Is it hard to believe that they have added to their list of folly?

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to great men and women on the basis of their actions, not on the promise of a future benevolent act. In Oslo, the committee overreached and made another error by giving an unproven world leader no chance to show that he was worth their good faith. They should rethink how and why the award is given.