FOR WHOM THE NOBEL TOLLS
The only mystery surrounding Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize is how it could possibly have taken the sanctimonious Norwegians this long to hand out their badly devalued award to the sanctimonious former president. Face it, they were made for each other–the president who wanted America to get over its “inordinate fear of communism” and the Scandinavians who never met a Soviet fellow traveler they didn’t want to throw a cocktail reception for and shower with several hundred thousand tax-exempt Swedish crowns.
The specter that haunts the Nobelists is that the Roman Legions might have known more about the ways of the world (“if you want peace, prepare for war”) than the New Seekers (“I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony”). So to scan the list of prize winners is to witness, in effect, a decades-long tantrum.
This year’s prize, for instance, was less about Carter’s good works than it was about sending a message of disapproval to George W. Bush. Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said the award “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. . . . It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States,” he said. A peaceful kick, we suppose.
Ten years ago, the award winner was an obscure Guatemalan Indian activist, Rigoberta Menchú, whose turgid memoir of oppression, “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” after being inflicted on a generation of unsuspecting anthropology students, turned out to be full of lies (not that this disqualifies you for the anthropology core curriculum). Why Rigoberta? To send a message of Oslo’s disapproval (500 years after the fact) of the Christopher Columbus conquest project.
Ditto the award in 1985 to the fellow-traveling “International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War”–that was Oslo’s kick in the leg to Ronald Reagan, who did more for world peace in eight years than the dynamite-fortune grandees probably ever will.
Did we mention that Yasser Arafat, Europe’s pet terrorist, won one too?
Yes, yes, we know. So did Lech Walesa and Mother Teresa. Even a blind pig sometimes finds a truffle.
OBESITY CONFLAB
At a gathering of the United Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Association last month, Tommy Thompson fired a salvo at the fast-food industry. America’s kids are getting too tubby, the Health and Human Services secretary observed, because they are “bombarded with ads for every imaginable kind of fast food.”
It was supposed to be a throwaway line, an HHS source says, the kind of sop any self-respecting politician makes to interest groups. But it got Thompson thinking (which can be a dangerous proposition for a cabinet secretary with too little on his plate) that there might be some good publicity in going after the fast-food industry.
To that end, Thompson’s office is trying to round up some fast-food executives for a meeting on America’s “obesity epidemic,” scheduled for this Tuesday, Oct. 15. Nothing’s concrete yet, but HHS spitballing has produced some stomach-turning ideas, such as requiring chains to offer fruits and salads, slapping health warning labels on burger wrappings, and even instituting a federal “portion control.” Whether that last bit means regulating how big a taco can be or how many can be sold to a single customer we’re not sure.
Needless to say, the fast-food folks aren’t thrilled with the ideas. “We can put broccoli on the menu all day long,” says an industry source, “but it doesn’t mean that people are going to buy that s–t.”
Before Thompson launches another nutrition crusade–even one aimed at a juicy target like fast-food purveyors–a little self-examination might be in order. Researchers are increasingly ambivalent about the government’s ongoing anti-fat crusade, now entering its third decade of failure. Indeed, the collective nightmare of the nutrition establishment, as Gary Taubes has described it in authoritative accounts for Science magazine and the New York Times, is that “their very own dietary recommendations–eat less fat and more carbohydrates–are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America.”
The perverse if satisfying conclusion: We might all be a little bit better off if the government paid less heed to how we eat.
AN ALERT TOO FAR
Two bills that propose spending millions to establish a national “Amber Alert” are barreling through Congress with enthusiastic support from both parties. At a glance, the proposal seems to fit nicely with hot lunch for orphans on the list of government programs everyone can support: Under the Amber Alert system (named for a 9-year-old Texas girl, Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996), local and regional media quickly and relentlessly broadcast descriptions of missing children. The system scored an impressive success when two teenage girls kidnapped at gunpoint from a Lancaster, California, lover’s lane in August returned home alive. But expanding it would probably do little more than squander tax dollars while creating a national rash of false alarms.
Kidnapping simply isn’t a major problem in the United States. While self-proclaimed advocates bandy about statistics claiming that 5,000 children are kidnapped each year, nearly all of them–including four that have resulted in the activation of California’s Amber Alert system since August–are caught in custody disputes. Under most state laws, simply returning a child late in a joint custody situation is technically a kidnapping.
In 2001 the entire United States saw 93 kidnappings where strangers snatched children intending to keep them, a decrease from 200-300 a year through the 1980s and early 1990s. Through August of 2002, only 40 were reported. (By comparison, at least 350 people are struck by lightning each year.) Even in large cities, children rarely get kidnapped: The New York City Police Department currently has fewer than 10 open kidnapping cases from the past 25 years.
Kidnappings with ransom demands, meanwhile, have one of the highest arrest rates of any crime: Well over 80 percent. Sexually motivated kidnappings by strangers, which happen at least a few hundred times each year, are more common but only rarely result in children’s deaths. Preventing them requires keeping pedophiles locked away: No alert can act quickly enough to stop them.
Meanwhile, for dramatic kidnappings like the one in Lancaster, we already have a nationwide alert system of sorts–it’s called cable TV news, and it happily provides enormous publicity even without a federal program.
AND ANOTHER THING . . .
We were going to swear off New York Times items for a couple of weeks; really, we were. But a reader wrote in to chide us for always going after bias and neglecting a “more fundamental problem–bad writing.” True enough. The name Sisyphus mean anything to you, Bub?
Anyway, our correspondent offered this egregiously mangled metaphor from the paper’s Oct. 7 sports pages: “For a week, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Tony La Russa added to his legend as baseball’s top brain brawler, using a mind as sharp as knitting needles to troubleshoot his team’s way through the defending World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks.”
We’re gonna put that in our pipe and chew on it till next week.
