NOBEL OBAMA

President Obama's Nobel Prize for Peace has Americans furious. Why? Let's start with the most obvious one: he's a black American. And America's vocal chords are not much different today from what they were forty-five years ago, when Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was a new faculty member at the University of Michigan then. I walked into my freshman English class and began by noting Dr. King's being so honored. One of my students--never mind his name, but I still have his name, his face, and his home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in my head--said, loudly and with conviction, "Give a prize to that n*****? They ought to shoot him."

But it's more than that. Obama stands for change. And in doing so he stands for a different America from the one George Bush appealed to.

Why weren't there constant protests against Bush? Why did the media avoid mentioning what protests there were? Because even among those who voted for John Kerry, there were plenty of Americans who supported Bush: even as he lied to us, even as lies were exposed that cost several thousand young Americans their lives. He was a warrior, a My-Country-Right-Or-Wrong American who thought war was the American Way of Life. He was a rich man who thought being rich was a Constitutional Right for his kind of Americans. And he was stupid. All three of those things appeal to Americans, never mind the political party.

President Obama has a tough road ahead of him. But he is a strong man, and he believes in what he is doing. He has to end the wars he inherited; there is nothing right about either of them, and never was. He has to close Guantanamo and the other illegal concentration camps the United States runs hidden away in other countries. He has to forbid torture absolutely--unless he wants to let somebody torture Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. And he has to get health care for ordinary Americans.

That's a lot. And a Nobel Peace Prize should help toward those goals. It would, certainly, in any country on earth except the United States.


Bert Hornback