Belated Congrats to Harold Pinter on the Nobel Prize

Sure it happened a few weeks back, but Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I was happy at the time, because Pinter was one of my first experiences with post-WWII drama -- the others being Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill. The sparsity of Pinter's language was exhilarating -- he and Beckett pruned sentences to their core -- and a long way from the dense growth that Faulkner cultivated (which I also love). But I filed it away in the back of my mind until I came across this irritating quote from Christopher Hitchens, a man whose senses deserted him like the last drops from a bottle of scotch:

The award to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket. [Guardian]

First, the notion that anyone could consider Pinter hysterically anything is ridiculous. And as he's done so often in the last few years, Hitchens confuses critiques of the U.S. government's bungled attempts at empire building with "anti-American" attitudes. Hitchens apparently forgets the outpouring of support and solidarity across the world -- and especially in Europe -- when September 11 occurred -- and he also forgets that that support eroded because most of the world saw through the Bush adminstration's fraudulent attempt to make a dictator -- who'd been crippled by ten years of sanctions -- out to be the world's greatest threat since Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong: Hitchens is extremely witty and his critique of Henry Kissinger is devastating. However, in the past, he didn't confuse critiques of some abusers of power with affinity for other abusers of power -- with Iraq, though, he seems to be convinced that all those who opposed the U.S. violations of international law somehow condoned Saddam Hussein's regime (the closer truth is that Bush and Hussein have similar cavalier attitudes toward "international law").

Here's a sample of Pinter's "hysterical" opinions on the U.S. and Iraq (Hitchens is a leading cheerleader for the situational ethics of pre-emptive war):

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East”. But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well President Bush himself answered this question only the other day when he said “We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation”.

I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

Pinter is a persistent student of language, who -- like George Orwell before him -- understands the power of language not only to reveal but also to obfuscate. Pinter merely parses the language that these governments put in front of us and as he does in his own work, he seeks out the roots hidden under the foliage and the dirt. He is working with material provided him by miserable failures like George W. Bush, and if you are an observer of torturous linguistic phrases, Bush provides fertile soil.