There is probably nothing that people would rather have mentioned in their obituaries than the fact that along the way they had won a Nobel Prize. And it’s not just the money, either, although 1.3 million smackers is nothing to sneeze at. No, what makes the Nobel Prize so prized is the prestige it gives the recipients. If you are lucky enough to win one, you will forever be known as Nobel Prize winner Burt Prelutsky or whatever your own name happens to be, and your words, even those on subjects far removed from the field for which you were honored, will be taken terribly seriously by a very gullible public.
I mean, you only have to look at some of the folks who have taken home the Prize to recognize its hallowed place in the world. The list includes the likes of Ivan Pavlov, Sir Alexander Fleming, Marie and Pierre Curie, Harold Urey, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Albert Einstein. Personally, I have no problem with such honorees. I mean, even though what I know about chemistry, medicine, physiology and physics, could be inscribed on the head of a very small pin, I am willing to accept that their contributions were remarkable. And if dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel had left it at that, I’d have no problem with the Prize; I mean aside from my never having won it.
Of course I’m aware that even in the sciences, people grovel for glory and will happily stab a colleague in the back if it improves their chances for Nobel recognition. But at least these folks are responsible for actual achievements. They discovered such things as penicillin, radium, heavy hydrogen, and the double helix.
I suppose because they had all this extra dynamite money lying around, the Scandinavians felt the need to invent a new category called economic sciences. Suddenly every two-bit economist woke up to discover that no matter how loony an economic scheme he came up with, he stood a good chance of winning a cool million in the Swedish lottery. In fact, one woman, in her divorce settlement from a professor of economics, insisted that she get half the loot if he copped a Prize within the following ten years. Sure enough, nine years and a few months later, the woman was $500,000 richer! I don’t remember the guy’s name, but it’s a pretty safe guess that he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. A slew of its professors have won the Prize just in the past few decades. By this time, they can pretty much promise new recruits a parking space, a discount in the faculty lounge, and a Nobel Prize of their very own.
But my real beef with the Nobel enterprise is with two other categories — literature and peace. And, no, I’m not bitter that in spite of my sterling prose, I haven’t been invited to don tails and give a stirring, but humorous, acceptance speech in Stockholm. For one thing, I don’t own a pair of tails, and, for another, I hate flying. And while I have no argument with such honorees as Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and John Steinbeck, and am even willing to grant that writers such as William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, and Jean-Paul Sartre, just might be acquired tastes that I never acquired, how did they come up with Giosue Carducci, Yasunari Kawabata and Shmuel Agnon?
I’m not suggesting that Carducci, Kawabata and Agnon, aren’t worthy of literary laurels. How could I? I’d never even heard of them. What I do know is that they wrote in Italian, Japanese and Hebrew, respectively. Are you going to tell me that anyone at the Swedish Academy read them in their original language? Baloney! It’s my hunch that periodically the Swedes simply decide it’s Japan’s turn to win or Italy’s or Israel’s.
What makes me even more convinced this to be the case is the hooey they concoct as a reason for lavishing fame and fortune on the poor sap. About Carducci, they rhapsodized: “A tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces.” About Kawabata: “For his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” And in praise of Agnon: “For his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.”
And then there’s poor Wole Soyinka, the pride and joy of Nigeria, who had to stand there in his best bib and tucker and keep a straight face while some Swedish gentleman actually said, “Mr. Soyinka, who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones, fashions the drama of existence.”
I suppose the fellow who writes this stuff will some day win a Nobel Prize of his own “for churning out high-sounding bilge year in and year out, expressing the Scandinavian fondness for unfathomable twaddle.”
For good measure, between 1901 and 1910, which was when Sam Clemens died, they managed to give the Prize to the likes of Sully Prudhomme, Christian Mommsen, Bjorstjerne Bjornson, Frederic Mistral, Jose Echegaray y Eizaguirre, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Rudolf Eucken, Selma Lagerlof and Paul Heyse, but not the author of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” I wonder if Sully or Jose or Bjorstjerne thought, when they received the good news, that they might have gotten Mark Twain’s mail by mistake.
But even the obvious shortcomings of the literature award can’t compare to the absurdity of the Peace Prize. It isn’t simply that the award has gone home with such villains as Le Duc Tho, Kofi Annan and Yasir Arafat. It has also left Sweden in Jimmy Carter’s suitcase, and in the luggage of scores of other self-righteous, lame-brained pacifists over the past 108 years.
This isn’t to suggest that people like George Marshall, Elie Wiesel and the Dalai Lama, don’t deserve our good thoughts, but I’d have thought better of them if they’d said thanks, but no thanks. I mean, the chairman of the Peace committee, in honoring Carter, made it clear that they were using him as a means by which to vilify President Bush for invading Iraq. And there you have a clue to the reason I despise Carter and the Norwegian Nobel Committee — and please don’t ask me why the Swedes out-sourced the Peace Prize selection to Norway. I hate Carter because he was so hungry for the tawdry honor that he grasped it to his bosom even though he knew he was only getting it because the presenters needed a stalking horse in order to insult his president and his country.
But, Carter aside, I hate the Peace Prize because it never goes to anyone who is waging war. These knuckleheads refuse to acknowledge that sometimes peace can only be achieved by those willing to confront and defeat evil. Peace, after all, is easy enough to achieve. All you need is to never oppose tyranny. So it is that no awards were presented between 1914 and 1919, except in 1917, when it went to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Then again, no peace awards between 1939 and 1943. Then, in 1944 — surprise, surprise — the International Committee of the Red Cross won again.
Inasmuch as they often honor groups and not merely individuals, wouldn’t you think the Scandinavians would have acknowledged their own debt to the R.A.F. and to the British civilians who risked their lives to rescue the English army at Dunkirk, or to the U.S. military, for that matter? After all, the Nazis were well on their way to weaning the Swedes and the Norwegians off meatballs and herring and on to bratwurst and sauerkraut.
Why didn’t they give it to FDR or, better yet, Winston Churchill? No, Sir Winston didn’t win a Nobel Prize for helping to defeat Nazi Germany. He finally got it in 1953 — for literature, for-crying-out-loud! — “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
I can’t help thinking that Sir Winston would have preferred winning it “for having tied a tin can to der fuhrer’s fanny.”