Eyes on the prizes

Virtue is supposedly its own reward. Recognition, though appreciated, is not essential and should not be demanded. Our hearts' memories have recorded our contributions to world healing, so fame, fortune and external rewards are dispensable. They do not define us and can be distractions.

But we are not Nobel Prize winners. 

It seems like the universal indebtedness of civilization has been heaped upon them. Their celebrity is marketable and most of them want to be remembered. Yet almost overnight, we forget who they were. Their legacies have been both enriched and damaged, as shown by this sample of laureates.

In 1949, psychosurgeon Antonio Moniz pioneered the technique of severing the nerve fibers of the frontal lobes of brains. These "lobotomies" made patients more pliant and submissive. The flip side was that it made them docile zombies, obliterating their personalities, emotions and thinking capacities.

A generation earlier, a chemist named Fritz Haber found an ingenious application for ammonia synthesis: chemical warfare. Witnessing many thousands of enemy Allied soldiers writhe and die in agony during World War I must have given him the thrill of validation.

Blood money can be the mother's milk of invention.

A Danish scientist (name retrievable from stacks of obscure footnotes) beat out the competition to score a Nobel Prize in Medicine for linking the ingestion of cockroaches by rats to the development of cancer. Another laureate for medicine created a pesticide that has been banned by international treaty, after having taken a huge toll on human and animal lives.

Around 20 years ago, a German virologist linked the HPV virus to cervical cancer. This certainly was a legitimate achievement that saved many lives, although a board member of a pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine was reportedly at the same time serving on the Nobel Prize selection board. That doesn't diminish the merit of the award, though it may suggest a coincidence, appearance of impropriety, or the potential of undue influence in other hypothetical cases.

It is rumored that Nobel committee members are sometimes, in a phrase coined by a current mayoral candidate, "wined, dined and pocket-lined." 

Alfred Nobel, who more than a century ago endowed the prizes and named them after himself,  was an explosives maven who invented dynamite, which is doubtless to this day still being used to blast people out of their ancestral homesteads in the name of eminent domain. 

Hitler and Stalin were both nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but apparently didn't pass muster, although Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, did. There's no looking back. The prize is revelation-proof and cannot be revoked.

There's also been some odd omissions. Thomas Edison and Stephen Hawking either were deemed to have fallen short of the Nobel standard or were rejected for some other reason. 

Mohandas Gandhi, who almost singlehandedly and bloodlessly expelled the British colonialist empire and modelled the largest independent democratic nation on earth, was not chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize, though President Obama was awarded the prize, as a civil rights initiative, with fingers crossed in hope and expectation that "the best was yet to come."

It was an IOU that lit up the world.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Auden, Joyce, Orwell, Chekhov, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Proust, D.H. Lawrence, Conrad and Greene crapped out. It's been argued that the literature and peace prizes, and perhaps others, should be "paused," because of their being popularity contests, voted on by unqualified people, often with vested interests and questionable scruples and criteria.

The Nobel Prize is sometimes made more meaningful when it has been declined on principle. In 1973, Le Duc Tho refused the Peace Prize for his role in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords that were to end the war in Vietnam, because hostilities had not yet ceased. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and writer, spurned it because he didn't want to be "institutionalized."

The prestige and credibility of the Nobel Prize is undermined, if not shot to hell, by the fact that as of three years ago, only 6 percent of 1,000 Nobel Prize winners were women. There should not be any statistical reservations for women or any other group. But it is madness to believe that this ratio could be fair and justified.

Depending on whether President Trump's recent apparent achievements in the Middle East and elsewhere hold up, he will likely be nominated for next year's Nobel Peace Prize. Will his intractable foes hold their noses and concede the honor, or will loathing supersede? 

This year's winner is Venezuelan freedom fighter Maria Corina Machado. Without knowing anything about her, she was automatically admired by many for having frustrated Trump's fruitless and vainglorious lobbying. But to widespread chagrin, Machado praised Trump as a crusader against despotism in South and Latin America.

Haven't we outgrown the false representations, if not the entertainment value, of Nobel Prizes, and for that matter, the Pulitzers, Academy, Grammy and Tony awards? What about the magazine covers, like "Pete Hegseth: Secretary of War of the Year."

Hegseth's recent speech at the 250th "birthday" celebration of the U.S. Navy was rousing to some, revolting to others and over-the-top for everybody. His "bully pulpit" was like a taunting bully in a schoolyard. 

Its "toxic masculinity" overflowed like clogged storm drains in the Rockaways during a hurricane.

His adrenalin surge was exceeded by a recruitment surge, which was overdue after years of low morale, peaked in part by the perception that the military had become more of a prodigious sociological experiment than a fighting force, which Hegseth views as not only its primary, but its exclusive mission.

His obsessive and unseemly harping on the thrill of "lethality," suggested his being titillated by battle imagery. It resonated as a bit perverse, albeit refreshing. Leanness, meanness and fitness for duty is the military's equivalent of a spiritual journey, allowing for intermittent missions of mercy.

Hegseth's demeanor demeaned the message.

All soldiers should indeed be required, without exception, to meet identical and firm standards of physical and psychological hardiness. No person should be advanced, impeded or accommodated because of gender, race or otherwise. 

The military must not become yet another "political football," as have, to some degree, policy aspects of law enforcement, education, medical practice, the judiciary and industries like Big Pharma.

It's said that charity is more sublime when given anonymously. Maybe that may apply as much to the receiver as the giver. 

Perhaps Nobel Prize winners should be notified privately and sworn to secrecy, with the understanding that if they seek to materially profit from it, or shed their anonymity,  they will forfeit their gains and the prize itself. But that would defeat the precondition of most human striving: ego.