Saturday, October 10, 2009

The Case for Honourary Prizes?

Listening to: "Starmaker", Kids from Fame (trying to restore my Fame faith)

Did you hear that Barak Obama, currently President of the USA, won the Nobel Peace Prize?

As much as I think that Obama appears a decent person and is an improvement over the last one in that office, you will have to count me amongst the cynical. Not even the line that:

- The prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments, not only to recognise efforts for peace, human rights and democracy after they have proven successful.


really mollifies me that much. If this is recognising the change from the previous administration, should the award not go to the American people (well, apart from the psychotic ones who participate in Fox News populist rallies)? Or maybe this is a change to make the Peace Prize more of a ratings winner, and turning it into an X Factor Idol event?

Bah, humbug. Everything seemed so much simpler in the 1980s. Communists were bad, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were good. Time for me to turn up my stereo...

Verdict: Its so hard to like "liberals" these days. Pat themselves on the back before they actually do anything, and then fail to actually act on that. Does Tony Blair still count as a "leftie" - and how did he end up as a Middle East Peace envoy? I don't understand international politics at all, it seems. 8 out of 10 for my own ignorance.

2 comments:

Not Kate said...

Yeah... I don't know much about that, but it seems fairly premature and popularist.

I'd say even Obama probably cringed when he heard he had that award. He's faught so hard to not get things too easy on a tokenism vote, and to actually get things on merit.

Maybe there's pressure on the committee because 'America needs it' in order to rebrand themselves as a peaceful country... but I don't think that's the intention of the award.

Or maybe there were actually no other good nominees this time around? That would be sad :(

It does seem really silly and a slap in the face to anyone else who had actually worked their butt off to deserve it (assuming somewhere in the world such people exist?).

Kiwi in Zurich said...

I'm with you on this one. All a bit disillusioned....the UN particularly ineffective. Take the pirates in the Gulf of Aden for example. We have Somalia which is essentially a failed states, and we have pirates....criminals hijacking boats and demanding a ransom. Explain to me why it isn't possible to do something about that? I don't get it.

In fairness to Obama, positive changes have occurred in the world, as aresult of him just being who he is and what he stands for. Unfortunately, I do wonder if the changes are just transient.