Giving One Pinter Pauses

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Ah, the words of a Nobel winner. Yassir Arafat? Jimmy Carter, you ask? No, the man of letters, Harold Pinter and winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. If the Swedish Academy wanted to praise an artist's work while smashing the US in a single choice, they could not have done better than old Mr. P.

Of course, not every decision and policy of the US has been successful or 100 percent noble but the playwright's screed begs the question, if we are such vile scum, why is the United States still standing? The biggest guns? The old USSR had some heavy artillery and yet it fell to the wayside after 80 or so years of torturing its citizens. The empty promise of the American Dream? Not so empty because people are dying to come to this country each and every day. The NYTimes Magazine had a fascinating article about 30 year-old Jordanian man. He was conflicted: does he travel to the US and work for Microsoft or does he join the Jihad? Decisions, decisions.

Pinter sees the US' glass not only as half empty but the liquid stale and putrid as well. This is one odd switch between the Neocons and the New Left: The Neocons are now the pie-in-the-sky dreamers (the Middle East can support a democracy!) while the New Left are the sticks in the mud. Ask many Lefties about deposing Saddam and trying to establish a democracy and someone will soon say, 'some people cannot be run by a democracy.' Imagine if Dick Cheney said, "some people cannot operate a VCR."

(Yes, yes, a VCR and a democracy are two different things but just because a people do not have experience with free elections does not mean that they naturally want a vicious dictatorship.)

It's a shame that Pinter cannot see the good that America has done to for the world: we share our technology and hope; we want democracy to flourish and we have a nasty habit of liberating people from the vice of fascism. This last fact misses the ailing Pinter, who, if the Americans had not joined the fight in WWII, would certainly have a Nazi swastika on the corner of his typewriter paper when he wrote his first play in the early 1960s.

Congratulations to Harold Pinter. Brilliant playwrite and a perfect dupe of the Nobel Committee.