An award about nothing

Anyone who still believes the Nobel Peace Prize is worth a penny more than the cash prize should read and re-read this excerpt from Wes Pruden’s column:

The Nobel Peace Prize was once thought to be the ultimate reward for selfless idealism, and if you're still in high school, maybe it is today. A decade ago four high-school girls in Kansas heard the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies from the Nazis. They wrote a play about her and sent letters to world figures, and this led to her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.


Miss Sendler, who died last year at age 98, smuggled the babies out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance over several months early in the war, hiding them in crates, burlap sacks and several times in coffins. She kept a barking dog to drown the cries of the frightened babies. The Nazis arrested her and tortured her severely, breaking her legs in a vise. She bribed a guard to escape a firing squad, and after the war retrieved the names of the babies from jars she buried in her garden, and reunited hundreds of them with relatives.


The Nobel jury was not impressed. They gave the prize that year to Al Gore for his slide show about global warming.

So when the Dear Dope goes to accept his award, he is going to stand up there and say…what? This thing should be called the Seinfeld award this year because it truly is an award about doing absolutely nothing.

By the time the award is presented, Arugula Boy will have convinced himself that, yes, he is worthy. Like everything else in his pass through life, Dopus Maximus has been moved to the head of the class ahead of his brighter more accomplished peers. He has been advanced in this manner so many times without merit, he will be able to convince himself that this is as it should be and it is he who is more worthy than the people like Miss Sendler who do the real work.

If he didn’t believe that, he’d show up and refuse the award. He’d introduce and recognizing several people in an endless list of people who have done more - more in this case being anyone who actually has DONE ANYTHING no matter how small - to earn such prize. Then the Dope would go away because he’d know he has no business sharing a stage with the least among them.