Some really radical stuff

Gasps as Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize


Let's face it. Those dudes on the Nobel committee in Oslo fired up their bong the other day with some really radical stuff, carefully grown in a quiet valley just north of San Francisco. Then they got down to work.

And they realized, correctly yet amusingly, that the one thing they could do to awaken and wickedly cajole a wide range of polities throughout the world would be to play a little trick on everyone. A little trick in awarding the 2009 Peace Prize to the one man on the face of the earth whom everyone -- literally everone -- has been paying attention to.

They knew they'd be virtually assured of success in stirring up the world's fetid waters (so richly in need of stirring) by bestowing the one Prize in the world that's freighted with dense, complex meaning and significance to the one human being in any nation who now embodies and provokes a wide range of meanings, reactions, questions, emotions, attachments. The one person of great import who is genuinely talking about peace, and how to get it.

Way, way beyond all others, this one will get attention. And fundamentally, that's what it's all about. Forget all the hifalutin sesquipedalianism. The true purpose of this Prize is to call attention to the fundamentals we face on this planet, now and quickly.

I'd like to get my hands on whatever they were toking, because that has got to be damn good stuff. Really opens up the mind and brings you right down to the most troubling fundamentals about life, society, human behavior, human consciousness. Forces you to confront what works and what doesn't. Even the Prize recipient himself will have to figure out this one somehow.

More to the point, those mild-mannered white guys, who sit uncomfortably on the ill-gotten riches spawned by Alfred Nobel's deadly explosives, are remarkably clever. Fantastically smart guys. They gambled on raising the stakes for themselves -- and for everyone else. That's the whole idea. Let's shake this place up. Damn complacency. Let's rile up everybody but good. And if a lot of people, shooting from the hip, declare that this year's Prize decision is bizarre or crazy or ill-advised or worse, then we will know beyond a doubt that we made the right decision. That we did the right thing.