and the oscar goes to

[click image... It's scary how much Herta Müller looks like my grandmother....]

In the course of disagreement, or a tug of war, of sorts, a whatever you call it, hereinbelow, I was put in mind of my ongoing thing with the Nobel committee. They're sort of like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences... not always basing their votes on strictly the merits. They're sort of geopolitical therapists. I was distressed about Aung San Suu Kyi getting the Peace Prize for causing the deaths and imprisonment of a bunch of Burmese martyrs behind her egregious hubris and then being confined to quarters for... maybe forever... for her brattiness. Excuse me, but that didn't even start to be a good way to deal with a cabal of vicious dictators. And, Al Gore and the climate scientists, well, there was a sound basis for it, but not in the way we have come to think of that. Lately, in the literature department, the gig has been to award the prize to people from non-Westernized cultures, to people who write in other languages than English... which gets very difficult because if you don't speak, say, Swahili, you have to rely on someone's translation... which... well... you know... that gets thorny as heck. And who says that is regularly going to be actually superior to things written in a more universally understood language? So, bless their hearts, they try to spread it around, and often resort to giving consolation prizes for heavy losses or personal suffering or generally defending sense in a world gone mad or overcoming hatreds to try to come to some equilibrium or being brilliant enough to stare down one's own schizophrenia to come out lucid after all... those sorts of things.

It does generally stick in the vicinity of true excellence anyway, and it's a nice tradition, and can really help motivate people to excel at things vital to humanity.

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UPDATE: Of course, the very next morning I find I am forced to change my mind about the overall goodness of the Nobel Prize committee's work....