Norwegian Precogs give Obama the Nobel Peace Prize

On October 3, 2009 SNL casts a satiric assessment of President Obama's list of achievements, here.

On October 9, 2009, The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee published its decision to give the award to President Obama.

Are the two events linked? Is the award served to Obama as some sort of consolation prize by this august European body of political commentators? Is it a warning to the American people, not to start treating Obama as a mere mortal elected to be their president, but to continue to worship him as the messiah he really is, born to lead not only America but the entire world to.. somewhere?

Is it maybe much more simple than that?

Norman Spector speculates that it be that "the Committee’s decision to cite Mr. Obama at this stage of his presidency is that he is not George W. Bush."?

Or

"The more generous interpretation is that the decision is hortatory; that is, it is designed to encourage the President to follow a path in U.S. foreign policy that is preferred by Committee members."

The gist of the two explanations is of course the same: That Obama pleases the anti-American sentiments still harboured by many Europeans. We like you, they say, because you made an appeasing speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, you went to great lengths to modulate your condemnation of Iranian atrocities in suppressing the demonstration of their own citizenry, you collaborated with the Egyptian representative to UN Human Rights commission to put restrictions on freedom of expression and to hold media ethically and legally accountable to "defamation of religions".

I wonder if this premature accolade will not end up being a source of great embarrassment, a millstone around the president's neck.

I am reminded of Spielberg's movie "Minority Report" in which a futuristic world experiments with pre-emptive crime prevention:

"In 2054, John Anderton is a member of an experimental Washington, D.C. police force known as Precrime, which uses future visions generated by three "precogs", mutated humans with precognition abilities, to stop murders."

The Peace Nobel Prize committee in its decision today acts very much like the precogs upon whose delirium the police apprehends criminals who have yet to commit their crimes.

The awarding of the prize is given not in recognition of actual, palpable, computable, countable, recorded, achievement but upon precongnition, "also called Future Sight, refers to perception that involves the acquisition of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information."

The flaw in this system is of course that the picture glimpsed by the precogs can be awfully misleading, leading to a travesty of justice. They can only see the image, they cannot tell how it was generated, or what chain of events and circumstances coalesce into the making of that, as it happens, damning image. So the police acting on that kind of information have to rely to a great extent on blind faith ...

These are the signs of the time that we live in, in which prophetic visions replace empirical thinking, in which a myth gains all the legitimacy of verifiable factual truth, in which a blood libel is hailed as a UN Report, in which "human rights" is a term used to demonize and criminalize an entire nation for exercising the right to keep its people safe from harm.

It's as if "peace" and "truth" have now acquired other meaning, which reside alongside the meanings commonly and previously known for these terms.

As Anne Carson, the great Canadian poet, wrote:

"What really connects words and things?

Not much, decided my husband
and proceeded to use language
in the way that Homer says the gods do.
All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings
alongside our meanings.
They flip the switch at will. "

It would appear that Homer's gods have awarded President Obama a Peace Prize.