FIGURING OUT THE NOBEL PRIZE. Obama or Merkel? Borges or Munro?

How do the Nobel Prize judges make their decisions?

Why was Obama awarded a Peace Prize and Mother Merkel has so far gone empty-handed? Okay, I can see the rationale here. You have to be involved in a war in order to make peace. The US had several on the go recently -- Iraq, Afghanistan, and briefly, Libya. Germany hasn’t been involved in a war in sixty years plus. So unless the Germans go haywire, Mutti doesn’t have a chance of making peace or making the Nobel Prize.

Also, the judges had to seize the moment and get Obama before he could ruin it all by sending more troops to Afghanistan. You could say the Nobel Peace Prize is a kind of incentive, to give a person something to live up to. It’s like saying, okay right now you don’t have a stellar reputation for keeping the peace, but we believe you’ll improve along the way.

That definitely doesn’t happen with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Authors don’t get Nobel pats on the head just because they might eventually write an iconic novel. It seems unfair, but they have to prove their worth up front and write and write and write for fifty years minimum.

But why did Alice Munro get the Nobel Prize, while Luis Borges who wrote just as many short stories never got beyond being touted as the next Nobel Prize winner? Maybe it was the genre. Borges wrote in the style of fantastic realism, which no one can understand unless they are a little weird themselves. And there was Alice Munro offering accessible, moving stories with quiet epiphanies everyone likes except for the highbrows who read the bleak stories in the New Yorker.

Ditto with the respective bios of Munro and Borges. She stuck to books: a degree in English lit, summer jobs in libraries (we’ll overlook the tobacco picking), founding a bookstore and keeping it going. That’s what I call a perfect narrative arc. Now look at Borges – no degree and sticking his nose into politics, being anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-Peronist, and after some hesitation, anti-military junta. I mean the guy was against everything. So of course the Nobel Prize judges shied away from Borges. Next thing you know he goes anti-Nobel!

Looking at Alice Munro, the Nobel judges were all smiles. Here was an agreeable woman who never caused trouble. And she won’t embarrass us in future, they thought, because she has vowed to retire from writing.

Of course Nobel Prize winners are notoriously unpredictable. Obama did send more troops to Afghanistan, and Alice Munro has changed her mind about retiring from writing. Let’s just hope she won’t get into that fantastic realism stuff!

From Justin Trudeau to the Presidential Campaign:  A Recipe For Political Success

What’s the most important asset for a politician? Integrity, vision, experience? PUH-LEEZ. Under what stone have you been hiding the last twenty years? The most important asset are pearly white teeth and an ability to stretch your lips sufficiently to show them off without giving the impression that your jaws are coming unhinged. That’s an art, people, and Trudeau Junior has it, along with  Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Mitt Romney, and Barak Obama (well, I won’t give him perfect marks, he doesn’t smile hard enough).  Trudeau Senior’s fuddle-duddle smile or Diefenbaker’s buckteeth wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s dentally perfect world.  And I’m just stunned -- gobsmacked stunned --that Harper’s schoolmistress smirk made it past the polls.

What else does a politician need? Policies? A platform? Naw. Never mind boring facts, as long as you have a good story, preferably about your hard scrabble life -- eating off an ironing board, making a desk out of an old door, that sort of thing. Romney and the Democrats got that right. And having Clint Eastwood talk to an empty chair at their convention – that was genius! The message: See that chair, folks? It’s as empty as Romney’s pockets.

Yup, Romney is poor. Or looks poor. Or is trying to. But otherwise, what politicians need first and foremost is money. That’s why those limits on campaign spending are just plain silly, and Super Pacs are a good thing. Let’s face it, a politician can’t win relying on the 47% who live on handouts from the government and have no idea how politics work. It’s the other way round, you sad yokels. You pay, and politicians pocket your money.  What do they need it for? To buy publicity of course. Do you know what TV ads cost nowadays? If you ask me, that’s why Romney is slipping in the polls: his ads aren’t up to scratch, or maybe they don’t speak the language of the average viewer, the guy watching the sports channel. You want to reach him, you need to stick to sports metaphors: knock-out punch, front-runner, game over – you get the drift. If you can’t cram a minimum of six sports metaphors into your ad, forget it. You might as well talk Russian or Chinese.

Which brings me to that other all-important requirement: a good campaign manager.  Barackbackers.com is critical of Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades. They accuse him of skulduggery, mischief, and dirty tricks. Don’t they understand? That’s what you want to see on a manager’s resume. I mean, Mattie Boy has what it takes. He doesn’t care about politics, online.wsj.com tells us with endearing frankness. “He isn’t inspired by ideology.” He just likes a good fight. And he is “a man of few words, plenty of them profane.” If you ask me, that man Rhoades is tops. Now if he could just make those campaign ads funnier or nastier or more like a football game.

 What else do you need as a politician? A wife and children who are willing to sacrifice for a noble cause, who will stand by their man and make him look human. Their message: You see? He’s no robot guided by aides working a central control panel. He has a wife and children. There is real blood flowing in his veins. Maybe Reagan went too far when he got involved in an actual assassination attempt, but the general idea was good: show the voter that you are flesh and blood. Just don’t be too human, like Clinton with Monica Lewinski. Blood is good, semen stains are too much of a good thing. But the all time worst mistake was made by Jimmy Carter, who admitted to dirty fantasies when looking at Playboy.  No wonder he remained a one-term president. Would you trust a politician who has ideas in his head?

The Lives of Politicians: Nicolas Sarkozy, Bev Oda, and Mayor Rob Ford.

You thought Obama had a tough life after using Jay-Z’s trademark gesture of brushing dirt off his shoulder and risking a copyright law suit, or Romney was in deep water after references to Hitler doing “one thing right”? No, Canadian politicians are worse off. Much, much worse.

Take Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. He has been ambushed on his own front lawn by aliens. It’s a good thing he called 911 and was rescued from what turned out not to be aliens after all, but the comedian Mary Walsh dressed up as Princess Warrior.

Next, he was accosted by a streetcar driver, who may have been naturally crabby or was one of those commies the mayor described as “two steps left of Stalin”  (http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/24/mayor-ford-calls-council-foes-two-steps-left-of-stalin). Now it seems that Rob Ford is under attack from Higgs Boson, which keeps attaching mass to him. As every physicist understands, that leads to weight – over 300 pounds in Ford’s case. This in turn causes emotional problems, such as loss of self-respect, so that the Mayor now refers to himself as Rob-Fucking-Ford (http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/ford-focus/2011/10/27/rob-fucking-ford-berates-911-dispatchers/.