Donald
Trump And His Quixotic Nobel Quest
When I was a teenager, the one thing I wanted in high school was a
varsity letter jacket. I had considered
that to be a level of success and respect at the time.
So I put myself through junior varsity and varsity sports whenever
possible. Of course, my choices were
limited since my school somehow decided not to participate in football. (Yes, I know, that is
sacrilege to many Americans. That has
since been fixed.)
Now, I had a few hindrances.
First, I was not as athletic as I wished I was. This was a long-term problem for me, but I
still put in everything that I could in the sports that I could participate
in. Second, I had no idea that the
system was rigged against me.
I learned the hard way that the varsity letters were an elite status
issued only to those deemed “worthy”, which basically were the same small group
of jocks who participated in the same three sports. No matter how much I participated with the
team, no matter how much effort I put in it, no matter how much crap I put up
with from everyone in the team, I was never going to be “worthy” of that
letter. Ever. At all.
The “elites” that ran that taxpayer-funded department deemed that I
would never get the symbol of that respect and achievement.
If anyone ever wonders why I hate school athletics and sports cults with
a passion, that’s pretty much the reason.
They had made a lifelong enemy out of me, and I will never forgive them
for it.
It is with this in mind that I have watched with some amusement and
perhaps a bit of pity as a certain spoiled narcissist is trying to get
something that he believes he is entitled to for seemingly no reason.
President Donald Trump seemingly believes that he is owed a Nobel Peace prize.
Not for anything that he did, of course, but simply because his
predecessor got one early in his eight-year tenure, and Trump feels that he is
owed one as well.
First of all, let’s get this out of the way: I do not believe that
President Barack Obama should
have gotten a Nobel Award in 2009. He had really not done anything at the time
to deserve one. All he did was win an
election that was otherwise supposed to be handed to Hillary Clinton.
This was a bad decision from the Nobel Committee is Oslo, and one that I
had hoped that Obama would have had the decency to turn down. Doing that would have earned tremendous
respect from even his diehard critics.
But he didn’t do that. Instead,
he set the stage for his successor to feel entitled to have one for the same
reason.
Just on face value, the idea that Trump would be nominated for an award
for anything related to “peace” is about as absurd as an outhouse in the middle
of a ballroom. He is a bombastic
self-promoting clown act that has used division and chaos to get where he is. The only “uniting” he’s been able to pull off
are more and more Americans in opposition to him. This is a man that flirts with war and
violent confrontations in the same way that he flirts with pageant contestants
and models and porn stars. He is no more
an advocate for peace than was Italy’s Benito Mussolini.
So why would he want a Nobel Peace Prize?
Because Obama got one, and Trump does seem to have an obsessive fixation
of erasing and negating the whole Obama presidency. Everything Obama put in place, Trump is
obsessed in dismantling it. And since
Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize, then Trump demands one as a way of negating the
uniqueness of Obama.
But there’s a problem with Trump’s quest.
Much like my quest for a varsity letter that I could never get, whether
or not Trump gets a Nobel Peace Prize is entirely
up to an elite committee of committees. It’s not a matter of popularity. The advisors at the Nobel Institute get to
make the final decision.
And, as
Trump has found out, you can’t “BS” your way into one like
it was a certain wealth list in Forbes Magazine. His fictional friends “John Barron”,
“John Miller”, and “David Dennison” cannot help him
here. He has to do something that would
“earn” him an award.
This brings us to Trump’s new obsession: meeting with North Korea’s Kim
“Panda Bear” Jong Un. “Rocket Man”, as
Trump called him. The one that takes
Trump’s catchphrase “You’re Fired” to literal
extremes with actual firepower.
Trump seems to think that just getting the Panda Bear to talk with him
would somehow give him that Nobel prize that he feels he is owed. Hell, his surrogates and enablers are
demanding that Oslo give him one for even making the
attempt at talks.
Of course, the talks may or may not happen. Kim’s “God King” egotism and Trump’s
“Twitter-Twit” narcissism make them both unstable characters. The scheduled talk for June 12 was already
cancelled at one point
when “Little
Lord Trumperoy” was “offended” by some of the statements
by North Korean negotiators, but then Trump said days later they were “back on”
when his “tough guy” approach was ridiculed.
Even if the meeting between the egos happens, that in and of itself
doesn’t mean anything will change other than Kim getting exactly what he wants,
which is international recognition.
Trump can make all sorts of promises he wants. He can promise to officially “end” the Korean
Conflict. He can promise to completely
“de-nuclear” North Korea. Hell, he can
even promise to give Kim a better haircut.
That doesn’t mean any of it will happen.
Kim can go right back to threatening nuclear war the next day, and Trump
can go back to insulting Kim in his Twitter-tantrums without missing a beat.
Oh, and think about this: Trump may not get a Nobel Award even if he
pulls off everything he promises! In
1973, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of Vietnam were
given the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the cease-fire in the Vietnam
conflict. President Richard Nixon didn’t
get one. In 1978, Anwar Sadat and
Menachem Begin got the Nobel Peace Prize for peace between Egypt and
Israel. President Jimmy Carter, who
orchestrated the talks, was left out and didn’t get one until 2002 for his
overall works. Mahatma Gandhi was
nominated in five separate years and he didn’t get one. What makes a self-promoting clown act who
managed to get elected to the highest office in America in what he himself called
a “rigged system” any more deserving?
Let’s get brutally honest here… Donald Trump is not deserving at this
point of a Nobel award for anything other than fiction. Peace is more than just a matter of
“intention”. Richard Nixon met with Chinese
officials, but that didn’t mean there was peace. Nor did Nixon get a Nobel Award for it. How many times did the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
meet and agree to nuclear reductions?
Did that mean there was peace?
Hell no. Did any of these
translate into a Nobel Award for the leaders?
Hell no. President Bill Clinton
met with Kim’s father and supposedly negotiated a “treaty” that turned out to
be a lie, but did either of them get the Nobel Peace Prize for it at the time? Nope.
I know the frustration of not getting something you want. I probably know that more than almost anyone. But once I realized that I couldn’t get that
varsity letter, I saw the charade that the athletic cult is. It opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of
spending millions for athletes at the expense of education. It would be asking way too much for a
narcissist like Trump to realize the futility of getting an award that he has
no business deserving, but certainly his sycophants and enablers should know
better. They should be the sane ones in
all this.
The Nobel Committee have made plenty of mistakes in the past. The exclusion of Gandhi was the most glaring,
but not the only instance. Even the
chairman of the Nobel Committee admits that they screwed up in giving one to
Obama. But that does not mean that they
should compensate by awarding it to an abrasive abusive narcissist who thinks
conflict and nuclear brinksmanship are just negotiating tools. And Trump’s sycophants need to be slapped
down for even suggesting that Trump is “entitled” to it simply because Obama
got one for nothing. You don’t make up
for past mistakes by making new ones.
You do it by holding yourself to your mission. If Trump want that award, then he needs to
work overtime to actually be the agent and enabler of peace that the award is
supposed to recognize.
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