Oct 10, 2009
On Obama’s Surprise Inspired Peace Prize
Ever since Barack Obama stepped onto that stage in Boston in 2004, I’ve contended that his multi-layered, multi-national, multi-racial background could enable his presence in the Oval Office to do more to improve the perception of the United States to the world than any all-star press team. It seems the Nobel Prize committee agrees with me. President Obama has captured the imagination of the world, reaching out to parts of the world that we generally tell to go piss on themselves—from the Muslim world to those prissy Europeans—and he has made policy that the most powerful nation in the world will not torture.
Do I think that this Nobel prize is due to whiplash from the Bush administration? In some—maybe some large—part. Like many people, I’m surprised that this prize has come so soon. But if words, imagination, and inspiration incite peace—well then, why not him? As Thorbjorn Jagland, chair of the Norweigan Nobel Committee said, “The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world. And who has done more than Barack Obama?” “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in its announcement. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
Those who deride this honor as an award of aspiration are missing the point. It’s not about aspiration, it’s about inspiration. It’s not about what Obama hopes or intends to do; it’s about the hope and intention he inspires in others. It’s about changing the way people see the world and what the world can be and what the world can produce. I am not a scholar of Nobel history, but I’m not convinced that there is something wrong with honoring someone whose eloquence and prominence brought about a November night filled with mass gatherings of happy tears, shouts of glee, and hugs for strangers in the streets of Chicago, Kenyan villages, Indonesian hamlets, and towns across the world that see Barack Obama as a little bit of their own.