http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2007/10/02/JohnBrummett/343527.htmlWhat if Gore wins Nobel?
Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007
By John Brummett
The Nobel Prize for Peace for 2007 will be awarded Oct. 12 in Norway. The buzz says it might go to Al Gore for educating and warning the world about climate change.
That is both a titillating and significant prospect, on many levels.
It titillates to imagine the lather into which such a selection would send the already irritated - in fact, the always irritated - American right wing.
This recently controlling segment of the American electorate finds itself in decline because George W. Bush, its embodiment of the Peter Principle, has pretty much ruined it by disastrous ineptitude. It denies global warming, detests Gore and has long dismissed the Nobel Prize as some kind of socialist Scandinavian plot against the free, logical and self-sufficient, at least since Jimmy Carter nabbed his.
All we know for sure is that Gore has been formally nominated. Should he win, the right will say again, despite all evidence to the contrary, that global warming is not happening. If failing there, the right will say that hand-wringing about the alleged predicament has nothing to do with peace.
But Gore's using his status to sound the alarm about dire effects to natural habitations, and to encourage people to change their ways, surely serves a peaceful cause. Trying to save the planet carries certain inherent peaceful connotations, don't you think?
Another titillating aspect of Gore's selection would be the ensuing tempest of political speculation that, most likely, would be contained to its teapot.
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It surely won't happen. World statesmanship is not something from which one can easily return for pedestrian and provincial political pursuits. A Nobel Prize is a rare honor and a matter of good will, but it probably lacks a great deal of American political capital. It's like being a Harvard graduate in Arkansas. Ask Gov. Bill Bristow and U.S. Sen. Nate Coulter about that.
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Finally, a Nobel for Gore would remind me again of something said by Rod Bryan, the progressive bicycling independent candidate for governor of Arkansas last year. It was that Gore could emerge as champion on the environment only because he didn't win the presidency.
Had he won, Bryan believed, Gore would have fallen victim, like all other politicians as usual, to the cautious, conventional, establishmentarian and special interest-influenced.
The point seems to be that changing the world is something you can do anymore only outside of politics as usual. It's that so-called transformational leadership can come only from those freed of the modern political restraints applied by money and spin.
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And that is why Mr. Gore was nominated for the Nobel in the first place. It was because he sees this climate crisis and the environment in general as a nonpartisan issue affecting the entire global community. His presentations are not limited to only Democrats but to all Americans who wish to learn the facts and join in the cause to save ourselves.
And looking at it from the above perspective, it could well be stated that he would not have won the awards he has or gotten this crisis into the consciousness of the people as he has had he actually been in the beltway. We cannot really know what fate has in store for us, but a Nobel Peace Prize win for Al Gore would signify to me that the road he is now traveling on is the right one (hopefully leading to his participation in a new climate treaty in Bali In December) and it catapults him above presidential status to that of a global leader on the environment at a time when such a global leader is most desperately needed.
We shall see what happens on October 12, and I wish him all the luck.
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