Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

I, like most people, was stunned to wake up and find that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I really have no idea how the deliberations on these things go beyond looking at the description of the proper recipient from Nobel's will. It said that the prize should be awarded:

. . . to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

I think you can make a credible case for all three of these criteria on Obama's behalf. But pretty much any US President is in a position to come out on top there every year if he's interested in peace and committed to multilateralism. So, only in the weakest sense of the term do I think that Obama "earned" the prize.

Over the course of the day, the rationale for Obama's selection became a bit clearer. In an interview with the New York Times, the Nobel Peace Prize's new committee chairman said:

It’s important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic, but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.

He then went on to use the examples of Willy Brandt, who won the prize in 1971 while Chancellor of Germany for his policy of rapprochement with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), despite the fact that his policy had yielded few results at the time he won.

This seems somewhat akin to handing out gold medals in the Olympics to the athletes with the most promise. The point of prizes like Olympic medals and the Noble Peace Prize is to reward achievement, not promise of it. I strongly believe that Obama is going to achieve things during his time in office, but he hasn't yet. But giving him the Prize now degrades its value. So, when Obama wins again for something like brokering a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, it will mean just a little less.

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Update: Hat tip to my friend TD for emailing me a particularly well-phrased question that helped me work out my thoughts on this.

Listening to The Clash's Sandinista! Again

I've been a huge fan of The Clash since I was a kid. While a lot of bands that I liked in my youth are now embarrassing to even mention (ahem, Def Lepard), my appreciation for The Clash has grown considerably. The band's 1979 release London Calling has been one of my default "play this" albums for well over 20 years.

"Spanish Bombs" is for me the quintessence of punk: it's both a rocking tune and a decent introduction to the Spanish Civil War. As a special bonus, the "oh my corazon" refrain rendered in Strummer and Jones' thick Brit accents is strangely endearing. Another song on that album, "Lost in the Supermarket", is hands down the most clever critique of consumerism I've ever found; every time I walk into a big-box store, it's queued in my internal sound track.

But, for some reason Sandinista!--the album that many critics consider to be the band's greatest achievement--never really got to me. I've owned the CD for many years and have probably listened to it every couple of years, but, always left with the feeling that the next time I was in a Clash mood, I'd put London Calling on. Tonight was different for some reason. I put Sandinista! on in the background while I was doing some cooking, and this time the album "took".

The first thing that hit me was just how extraordinary Paul Simonon's bass-playing is on this album. This probably caught my attention because the mixing on the album pushes the bass rather hard (and it works). The brilliant, jazzy "Look Here" is one example. The riff is a pretty standard one from the jazz bass repertoire, but Simonon gives it a Clash signature, in part by playing what you'd expect to hear on an upright bass on an electric. "One More Time" is another example, but this time in a ska piece (and one that includes among Strummer's most brilliant lyrics: "you don't need no silicon/to calculate poverty." This song was recorded in 1979, i.e., before the birth of the personal computer.)

After my revelation about Simonon while listening to Sandinista!, I went back to my usual Clash fix, London Calling, to hear if I'd been missing something in that album. And I had. It is clear to me now that Simonon's bass is one of the driving forces on this album as well. If you take his bass work out of "Lost in the Supermarket", the song loses its musical soul and with it the substantial punch behind Strummer's lyrics. And "Koka Kola" becomes just another song.