Good Grief!

Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for making a propoganda film?

Naturally, people are praising his "courage." A funny thing, courage. It used to apply to folks who did heroic things at great risk to themselves. Now it means that someone is willing to stand at the front of an enormous parade and beat the drum loudest.

Now you hear people praised for their courage for saying that AIDS is bad, for making raspberries at long dead conservatives, for whining about their own disabilities ad nausea, etc. If this is courage, I would hate to see cowardice.

Part of the problem is that courage has become to be such a universal good, that it is easy to forget that courage can also be foolish, wrongheaded, and even downright evil. You want to display courage? Go into a black biker bar in East Oakland and make a stump speech for the Klan. Stupid, yes. Wrongheaded? Yes. Evil? Sure? Courage? You betcha. It would take cojones.

The problem with Al Gore is that he can be in no safer position. He has enormous amounts of money, almost none of which was ever at any risk in this film (and if it was, he knew he would recoup because he is the darling of the most pathetic faction of the left, and that is the faction that is the fastest growing movement in liberal politics). His political career was otherwise finished (Democrats hate losers in their own party, even when they plead the case for a Convenient Untruth). As a public figure he needs the spotlight. It would almost be better for him to get arrested for DUI than to have a year pass without being in the headlines at least once.

So he takes a topic that is dear to the hearts of the left, namely the environment, and takes an aspect of it that is prone to hysteria, already played up as "the major issue", and nearly immune to criticism.

This is courage? This is worthy of half a $1.5 million prize?

Speaking of those moments when prize committees reveal themselves as has-been's: remember when Kara Walker got a MacArthur "Genius" Award? She seemed like a one-trick pony back then, and, guess what?

She still is.

Sometimes I expect a rhinocerous to come walking across the stage.