Hey authors, want to win the Nobel Prize? You can increase your odds by doing one thing: telling the world how much you hate America.
Men of average intellect in fields outside of literature also find their reputations burnished by the Nobel Committee in return for bashing George Bush and American foreign policy. Ask Jimmy Carter, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize a few years back for setting up a diplomatic framework that allowed North Korea to go nuclear.
Billy Carter couldn't have screwed that one up any more than his overmatched, self-righteous brother. Still, I guess we should thank our lucky stars that Billy's overtures to Libya were ignored by the Nobel Committee in the 70's.
But these days, the true anti-American haters seem to litter the literary awards category.
This year's winner, Harold Pinter, loathes America in a way that would make Hugo Chavez blush.
In his recent Nobel lecture, Pinter compared the United States to the Soviet Union-a regime that killed up to 40 million of its own people. Then Pinter took it a step further by lamenting the fall of that evil regime since Stalin and his type provided "constraint" against US policies.
Pinter then described America's foreign policy this way:
"It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed."
The author then cited "the tragedy of Nicaragua," mourning the fall of that "intelligent, rational and civilized" Marxist regime. Pinter placed the Sandinistas' downfall at the feet of the United States.
Funny, but I remembered the Nicaraguan people chasing those rational Marxists out of power in the 90s.
Ahh. But facts always bored Pinter and his type. Later in his lecture, this year's winner became unhinged, accusing American leaders of employing Jedi mind tricks on an unsuspecting world.
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
"I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. It's a scintillating stratagem."
Pinter blasted the system of "gulags" in the United States, as if letting murders, rapists and child molesters run free in the streets of American cities is a preferable option. He also used his Nobel platform to call George Bush and Tony Blair war criminals who should be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.
I could reprint more of his drivel in this space but you get the point. This bitter man, whose greatest contribution to literature involved his putting his pen down-the Pinter Pause-got a Nobel Prize because of how much he hated America.
The United States of America is the root of all that is evil in this world, according to Pinter. Never mind the fact that my country has spent the last century liberating the world from Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Milosevic's Serbia and Hussein's Iraq.
Forget also that we are spending our money and blood to kill al-Qaida terrorists who would blow up Pinter and his countrymen in a second if the author succeed in reversing US foreign policy.
But America will not surrender to terror.
We will not surrender to al-Qaida.
And we sure as hell will not be cowed by a diseased mind like Harold Pinter.
