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I'm a little bit dismayed that Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Because it doesn't fit the trajectory of the story I want to tell (the history I want to live). Like so many liberals who voted and worked for Obama, I saw (and still see) in him the potential to catalyze impoerant, positive change in our political and social systems. I don't expect him to do it alone - indeed, I don't even expect him to want all the same changes I want. I expect us to have to "make him do it." But I think he might be the first public figure of our time with the tools to make actual change happen, if we can point him in the right direction and give him the support he needs.
So why does it bother me that he received the Nobel Peace Prize? Because the timing feels wrong.
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| I think this is what a lot of liberals are trying to express when we say he "hasn't accomplished enough." There's a story, a narrative trajectory, that the witnesses and participants in historical events perceive those events to have; much of that narrative is built after the fact, but competing narratives also play out in real time. I would promote a narrative that says Obama hasn't quite found his sea-legs yet--that actions like contemplating escalation in Afghanistan, delaying action to overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell, embracing Bush/Cheney-style secrecy and preventive detention policies, and being too willing to compromise with intransigent conservatives on health care are all mistakes made early in the game, errors that can be corrected later. These should all be events from Act II, when our hero makes mistakes that inform his later decisions. That story leaves him with time to "see the light" and come around to agree with me about everything. Because, after all, I know what's really right.
To grant him the Nobel Prize now matches a different kind of story, one where the hero is elevated too early to universal acclaim. We know how that story ends: hubris, error, destruction, tragedy.
Can he avoid that story arc? Can we? Of course. He's no dummy, and neither are we. All the world is not literally a stage. But the competing stories are forces to be reckoned with, because narrative itself has power to inform and structure the actions of historical actors.
I would have preferred a political narrative on both the national and world stages in which Obama was just beginning to enact sweeping changes, and still figuring out how to mobilize and coordinate with progressive actors at home and abroad who are his natural allies. The Nobel Peace Prize, or something like it, would be a spot on the horizon in that story, a reward for successes still to come. Coming now, the Prize is an event that makes my preferred story harder to tell, and other stories, some of which have outcomes I don't like, easier.
If stories were unimportant, than concerns like mine would be trivial. But stories matter. So I'm concerned. |
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