canadiancomment

Our opinions and advice to the world. Updated whenever we get around to it.

Are The Nobels Still Relevant?

It really is a simple question isn't it? My own opinion is that the various scientific and economic Nobels still do a good job of recognizing significant achievements in their fields.

Oh the other hand, the Nobels for peace and literature are nothing but a complete shambles and an insult to legacy of the awards. Yesterday, Harry Pinter was honoured with the Nobel prize in literature. As The Globe says:
The 75-year-old British playwright, poet, screenwriter, actor and, in the words of one biographer, "permanent public nuisance" made his presence felt on the English stage in the late 1950s and early 60s in a series of plays in which characters are permanently at a loss for words and where communication failure is endemic.
And what has Pinter done lately? Well nothing unless you count:
Even though Mr. Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 2002, he remained an active opponent of the Tony Blair-George W. Bush alliance after the 9/11 attacks.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail in October of 2001, he said that what happened on 9/11 "didn't come of the blue. It was an act of retaliation against a background of a whole tapestry of U.S. power and manipulation of power throughout the world for many years."

His anti-war, anti-Bush views increased in volume and vitriol with the war in Iraq in March of 2003. In accepting an honorary doctorate from Turin University in Italy, Mr. Pinter compared his "personal nightmare" of cancer with "the infinitely more pervasive public nightmare -- the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence . . ."
I see...

So now the Nobel Prize in literature is given based on how much you opposed the war in Iraq and not based on any type of recent literary achievement?

I'm not even going to bother complaining about the Nobel Peace prize.

crossposted to The Shotgun

4 comments:

Looney Canuck said...

I think that the Nobel Peace prize lost its meaning in 1973, when Henry Kissinger won it.

Anonymous said...

The Nobels, like the United Nations are less and less relevant.

They have been fataly infected with extreme leftism...

Looney Canuck said...

Fatally infected with "extreme leftism"? So there's no cure for it, or any drugs or therapy to make it less extreme? Surely it's not as pervasive as you make it out to be. The extreme "Left" is not what it used to be since the end of the Cold War.

Anonymous said...

In my opinion Pinter's award has nothing to do with literature (or anti-literature to be accurate) and everything to do with his anti-Bush stance.

Do you think he would have got the award if he had spoken up in support of Dubya ?