war and peace

Skimming over what has seen the light of the day during the last few months, I realized the other day that this blog has become way too positive, almost cheerful. This is not against my nature – I see no point in being anything but an optimist – but against my culture and traditions. Being German it lies in my blood to criticize, find fault, take exception and be grumpy.

To give this aspect of my personality room for expression, I decided to launch a special section on the blog called Collected Moanings that has nothing to do with anything and will tend to contain random irritations collected over the week, things I heard on the radio or read on the internet, things that annoyed me. There will be no fixed schedule and no topical consistency. The rants will be published al gusto, whenever I feel enough madness has transpired in the world that the floodgates can be left shut no longer for fear of their bursting.

The trigger for this decision, it is not hard to conjecture, was today's announcement that this year's Nobel Peace Prize goes to Barack Obama. I immediately went to the Nobel Foundation's archives to see if any other Commander in Chief of an army at war had received the Nobel Peace Prize. It is not common, and it seems that ending wars is a better qualification for this prize than waging them. Mikhail Gorbachev got his prize one year after pulling out of Afghanistan.

The prize, a major global recognition, is even more baffling when you imagine that three years ago the recipient was an obscure and junior US senator whose main concern was (rightly so) the economic well-being of a undistinguished Midwestern state. Since then, his most visible achievement has been a brilliant Presidential campaign, for which he has already been amply rewarded – with the office he sought and near universal adulation.

Since then, he has tried hard to prevent the U.S. economy from collapsing and given a few inspiring speeches here and there. He has a dream that one day we will live in a world without nuclear weapons, but this dream is shared by billions who'll never see any recognition. More damagingly, he is the only U.S. President in living memory to adjourn a meeting with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders without a joint declaration, without at at least giving the impression of caring about peace in the Middle East. What was the prize for, exactly?

Apparently it was for having grand ideas and visions, but that's not what prizes are usually handed out for. They're for recognizing achievers not dreamers. For visions and ideas, to help them come true, there are grants. This is, by the way and not at all unrelated, how research is done.

Scientists see unsolved problems and come up with ways to tackle them. They write grant proposals (their humble way of giving eloquent speeches) and, with some luck, a funding agency gives money to support the work in the scientists' labs. Years or decades later, when results have been published and generally accepted by the scientific community, prizes are given to those who had the right ideas, a steady hand with the experiments and the iron will to persist.

Earlier this week, and this is where this little digression finds its target, the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry were announced, all for work done long ago and safely established as monumental. I'm especially happy that Venki Ramakrishnan, a kind and humble fellow and a most brilliant scientist, shares the chemistry prize for his work on the bacterial ribosome. My work uses the same method and approach, so it's nice to hear it talked about on the radio, but it's even nicer to know, from interacting with him at the University of Utah and later at conferences and meetings, that there could hardly be a more deserving winner than Venki.

Coming back to the main thread of the post, Barack Obama is not deserving of a prize yet and, as President of the United States of America, doesn't not need funds or recognition to drive his vision. He has the tax dollars of the world's largest economy, the foreign reserves of the world's second largest, by PPP, and the ear of all the world leaders to help him see his plans come to fruition. Once he has achieved half of what he aspires to, he would be the bookmakers' favorite for any prize. Lexington, at The Economist, is reminded by this massively premature prize of a line from a movie, "Applauding the tenor for clearing his throat". Like him, I'm eager to hear the song.

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This inaugural post turned out to be a bit more single-focused than I had hoped (and there was no space to write about the folly of subsidizing solar power generation in Germany, which came up on the news today). You can look at it as a pilot. That's why it got it's own title. The next items in this series will be shorter, more mosaic and hopefully even angrier.