The Nobel* season is upon us, and the game this year is to tie every prizewinner into an implicit slam against the Bush administration and/or proof that every major institution on the planet is controlled by a cabal of lefties that won't let Tom Clancy or the writers of CSI Miami take their justly deserved place among the ancient gods. Works for me...
See, I just don't understand this. Rightwingers make it a point to be both anti-science and anti-intellectual, so it hardly takes an, er, rocket scientist to figure out why righties don't typically win the awards. What, did they really think the Discovery Institute was in the running this year, for their condemnation of every major scientific advancement of the last four hundred years in favor of the theory that Adam and Eve milked dinosaurs and sold the resulting DinoCheese in Cain's chain of God*Mart retail outlets?
"Well, this year we were going to give the award to these guys whose work made possible the complete mapping of the human genome, but these other guys have some really good artists' renderings of Noah waving at a stegosaurus. So let's call it a draw."
Whatever. Anyway, alicublog and Acephalous have rundowns of people who fall somewhere between lazily and finger-waggingly offended at the choice of Harold Pinter for the Nobel Prize for Literature -- because, you know, the quality of all literature can be measured only in terms of how it serves the Needs of the Party. Best offended wingnut quote:
Nobody takes this stuff seriously anymore. I can't remember the last time I read a literary novel by a living writer or attended a play by a living playwright.
Um... 'kay. I guess scraping the crust from between your toes takes a lot of time, but I'm not sure taking public pride in your own self-enforced social illiteracy is really the best kind of attention to attract to yourself.
Sigh. I'm such an "elitist".
[* For you right wingers out there, it's like the Emmy Awards, but for scientists and authors and stuff. And the winners get Robotic Death Lasers and the password to the secret spy network that connects all the refrigerators in the world. They're watching you right now.]