Has the Nobel Prize Committee gone completely nuts? The Daily Beast seems to think so. Commenting on the Noble Prize for Literature going to Herta Muller (who the hell . . . ?) and the Noble Peace Prize going to Obama, Lee Siegel unloads:
Need we add that Nicholas Roerich was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize . . . ?Never mind the handwringing over whether Muller’s husband, a novelist named Richard Wagner, was related to Richard Wagner [yes, that Richard Wagner], which, combined with the fact that her father had been an officer in Hitler’s SS, was just asking for trouble. The important thing was to confirm, absolutely, that Obama himself was not related to Hitler—despite the resemblance in a certain type of poster that had been in circulation over the summer—and that his plan for overhauling health care was not derived from the Nazi euthanasia program, which Muller’s father probably supported, and which Muller, and Wagner, most certainly—we hope!—are opposed to. Wagner the husband, that is.
What a mess! But then the Nobel Peace Prize, especially in the last decades, has been mostly a self-satirizing disaster.
