Narratives Kill, or Al Gore Isn't The Worst

I have heard it said that one can not watch a soap opera for several months and still pick up again almost immediately and know what is going on. As an extreme example, I once mentioned to a soaps fan the two episodes I had seen of something in the 1970's or early 80's. I don't even remember the show, but someone asked a detective if he had any suspects for the (supposed) murder of Marco Dane. The detective tossed down the phone book and said "Anyone who knew Marco Dane for more than fifteen minutes had a reason to kill him." I thought it was a great line. I saw part of the show again a year later, and Marco Dane's murder was still prominent in the plot.

I said this to my fan friend sometime in the last few years. She told me that Marco Dane was back.

I had much the same feeling being away from the news and the blogs for a week while I was in Houston. On a TV screen in a restaurant, the crawl said that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Well of course. Why read the papers or log onto the blogs about it? The detail of Gore (and later, I learned, the IPCC) getting the prize was only a small part of the larger pattern of how Eurocrats think and act. It's hardly worth even mentioning.

Alfred Nobel's will specifies that a peace prize be given to someone who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". This is the recipe that people of good will a hundred years ago thought would work. If we could just have more peace congresses...if we could get everyone to throw away weapons or reduce armies...if we all got together and did nice get-along things... Imagine there's no countries, and all that. The award-givers were true to their charge. They gave the award to someone who still believes that those things would work if we just tried hard enough. Gore actually isn't such a great choice, because he is less of a wussy pacifist than they would like to pretend. He just sounds that way when he gets rolling on climate change.

Climate change isn't about peace, exactly, but there are similarities. That whole fraternity among nations thing fits well, and so do the environmental conferences, which are like peace conferences in many ways. A minuscule subgroup of many nations gets together and agrees what everyone else should do. Nations which have no good intentions toward anyone else get invited and condemn the same people in your rich nation that you do. That, my friend, is fraternity. The Nobel committee rewards people who support their belief in this outdated and patently stupid process. The Eurocrats and many Americans still believe in this process because they can imagine a story how it should work. If everyone reduced their standing armies (or their nuclear weapons), they can se how that would probably maybe mean less war. If nations did fraternal things and all pulled together, then it would stand to reason that they would all like each other better and stop fighting. Wouldn't it? Can't you just picture it? And peace congresses! What could be better? If all these folks could just sit at the same table they would all see how human everyone else is and they'd go home and tell the others how this can all be talked out.

That belief is a failed god, however much people want to prop up the corpse and worship it.

There isn't really much contradiction in giving the peace prize to environmentalists. The Nobel committee has been wandering farther afield for years, giving awards to various do-gooders who are killing people. If you check the list, you will see that UN committees and officials win this award frequently. It's also a good peace-career move if you found a group that talks about peace (or, y'know, other good stuff) to governments a lot, or are a religious leader who says nice things about peace.

The most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was farther afield than even Gore or Jimmy Carter are. 1970 winner Norman Borlaug saved an estimated one billion people from starvation.

Yassar Arafat, on the other hand, won the award in 1994 in the more traditional way: he went to meetings about peace.