Bryan Zepp Jamieson: A Nobel Calling

“Welcome back, America. We missed you.”

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 8, 2009

I think most people, when hearing that the Nobel Peace Prize had been
awarded to Barack Obama, were incredulous. Matt Drudge had a headline
that seemed to encapsulate the reaction most people had: “For WHAT?”
American troops are still in Iraq, although their presence is greatly
reduced. Obama has been trying to shut down Gitmo, but it’s still there,
and 150 untried and uncharged men still languish, their lives pissed
away by American caprice. And in Afghanistan, the occupation continues,
and Obama is said to be dithering over whether to send 40,000 more
troops or 60,000.

The last American to win a Nobel Peace prize was Al Gore, for his work
on global warming. But even on that score, Obama seemed a questionable
choice. While he has strongly advocated green technology and industry,
his attitude on global action is mixed, to the extent that there are
accusations that the Americans are trying to undermine any accord to be
reached at the big upcoming conference in Copenhagen.

Other American presidents have won the prize. Teddy Roosevelt got one in
1905 for his work on setting up a peace treaty to end the
Russian/Japanese war. Woodrow Wilson got one in 1919 for working to
establish the League of Nations. Jimmy Carter, who was cheated out of
the prize for the Camp David accords, got one anyway in 2002 for his
humanitarian work in general. In all three cases, it’s not hard to see
why they won the prize. In fact, with one glaring exception, the Nobel
Peace Prize has usually made sense. That exception, of course, was Henry
Kissinger. They gave him the award for his role in the Vietnam peace
talks, along with his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, and had to ignore his
hobby of advocating the immolation of hundreds of thousand of men, women
and children by carpet bombing in his effort to prevail at the peace
talks. That was a bit like giving Tony Soprano an award for labor
negotiations.

But what, exactly, did Obama do to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Obama himself seemed at a bit of a loss, saying, “To be honest, I do not
feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the
transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and
women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their
courageous pursuit of peace.”

I’m glad that Obama was inspired by other Nobel Peace Prize winners, but
it seems a thin reason for getting one himself. That’s a bit like being
invited to join the band REM just because you like their music.
Obviously, a clearly perplexed and surprised Obama felt the same way.

I don’t have any leads into the thinking in the Nobel committee’s
selection, but I can hazard a guess.

Simply stated, Obama got the prize because he isn’t George W. Bush.

There’s no delicate way of putting it: during the two Bush terms, the
United States behaved like Nazi Germany. It invaded two sovereign
nations that were not aggressive, posed no threat to the United States,
and then occupied them. The United States set up gulags around the
world, both known (Gitmo) and unknown (even now we still don’t have a
clear accounting as to how many US gulags there are in eastern Europe
and the former Soviet ‘Stans).

As the rest of the world surged forward, hoping to deal with global
warming and the economic meltdown, the US sought to sabotage any efforts
to deal with pollution or anything that might impede what the
administration clearly saw as a divine right of major corporations to
rape the world, and it was runaway cowboy capitalism in America that
caused the economic meltdown.

To the rest of the world, the US had turned into a rogue nation.
Countries that had, for years, embraced the American model now anxiously
worried that Americanism might damage their own economies and the rights
of their own people. Even in Canada, Conservative plans to privatize the
economy were stalled because the opposing parties held up the American
economy – as a bad example. Canada is America’s best friend; when
Canadians are showing pictures of Uncle Sam and saying, “Don’t be that
guy,” it’s a sign that something is desperately wrong with America.

Despite the self-pitying whines of right wingers who feel, in the words
of the Randy Newman song, “Nobody loves us, everybody hates us, guess
we’ll drop the big one on them,” America was the best loved and most
respected country in the world all the way through to 2001. Everyone
knew America had flaws, but counted on America to at least try to do the
right thing. It made the failures easier to forgive, knowing that
America wanted to do right.

Watching America during the Bush years was pretty much like watching a
close friend or relative succumb to a bad drug habit. You could see that
person going downhill self-destructively, and you knew that at some
level, that person could see it too, but that wasn’t going to make it stop.

Then came the election of 2008. Obama, just by being elected, made a
statement about war mongering, police state stuff, racism, greed, and
being a corporate lackey. His election showed that the people in America
still had some resolve, and weren’t always going to do the bidding of
the corporate interests that have so corrupted and subsumed the American
government.

Obama was America’s way of standing up in front of a group of friendly
strangers and saying, “My name is America, and I’m an alcoholic.” That
Obama was elected showed that Americans realized that America had a
problem, and it was time to address that problem.

The rest of the world was paying close attention. When Obama drew those
huge crowds in Berlin, they weren’t there for the novelty act of a black
man running for President; they were there to see if Obama could remind
them of the America of the Marshall Plan, the America that dared to go
to the Moon, the America that airlifted millions of tons of food into
Berlin rather than let the Communists take over. Was there anything left
of the America that vowed to feed the world, that wanted to extend the
five basic freedoms to all people, that told the world there was nothing
to fear but fear itself?

Obama isn’t the answer. He is simply an answer. He can’t cure all the
evils of the Republican regime, and doesn’t want to cure some. But he
has at least stopped the calamitous plunge that defined America during
the previous eight years. Instead of the swaggering, empty little bully
boy whose cowardice was so evident, the American president was now calm,
reflective, intelligent.

You can’t give the Nobel Prize to a country. So they gave it to the
individual who best reflected what was happening to that country.

The Nobel Prize committee remembered the years when America was great.
They remembered when America was strong, when Presidents sent their own
sons to fight in wars that America fought, not because it wanted to, but
because it had to do the right thing. They remembered when American
supplies landed in areas of drought or famine or war, with no surly
remarks about giving precious food to undeserving ethnic terms while
people at home needed help. They remembered an America determined to
fight poverty and privation, that felt a moral calling to make the world
a better place.

Obama isn’t all those things. America isn’t all those things. But
Obama’s election showed that America had stopped turning her back on her
own strength, her own goodness, her own greatness.

They weren’t giving the award to Obama. They were giving the award to
America. They wanted America to know how much they valued the America of
years past, the good guys that everyone respected. They wanted to
belatedly thank America, and to wish America success in her efforts at
sobriety.

They were, in effect, telling America with this award, “Welcome back,
America, we missed you.”

As Michael Moore noted, getting the prize gives Obama something to live
up to, and I hope that Obama really does see it that way himself. He’s
not perfect, a long way from it, but his heart does seem to be in the
right place, and it was a good time for America to be reminded that she
does have friends who care about her.

Obama may not have done anything to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, but it
might just be the most sensible – and the most productive – choice
they’ve ever made for that honor.

Welcome back, America. We missed you.