Thursday, October 7, 2010

Finally a real winner

The Nobel Prize in general has become a joke, and the peace prize you can only win if you murder enough innocent people. Funny then that someone that seriously deserve it actually got one.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author, has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy said it honored the 74-year-old author, considered one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking work, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."

The author of over 30 books - and very nearly the president of Peru - Vargas Llosa is one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the post-war era and really one of the really, really good guys. Most regard him as a libertarian, I wouldn’t go so far, but he is damn close and as such a unique figure to win a Nobel.

His highly public criticism of the Castro regime is enough to make into my good book. And as an outspoken critic of authoritarian regimes on the right and the left, who else but Vargas Llosa would have called for the legalization of drugs while addressing the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner a few years back?

This is a real winner. One of the good guys. Sadly the committee won’t withdraw past prizes like the one given to the Obamination last year, and this does not in any way make up for past offences, the Nobel Prize is still going down the crapper as far as I can tell, but it is at least a small token of goodness.

And to hear the cultural elite, that is completely dominated by the far left, go complete ape shit is a big, big bonus.

1 comment: