Well played, Gore

Oh, and by the way, this is how I really feel: kudos to you, Al Gore. You deserve the Peace Prize.

Pundits like to pre-analyze how posterity will view the historicity of political leaders. I won’t gauge George W. Bush. His father may enter the annals as “Father of George W. Bush,” not as a politico in how own right. George W. may come out as “igniter of escalated discord and instability in Middle East,” or, he may surprise us with a full-on “improver of Middle Eastern relations.” Personally, I’m rooting that he’s one of those totally historically forgettable presidents that you just have to memorize because he’s on the list. Only time and Houghton-Mifflin will tell.

Al Gore’s had a hard time getting people to listen to his own new groove after the electoral debacle. He’s talked, and his loyal followers have listened, but, in the U.S. political vacuum, it’s seemed like he was one dog barking into the wind of Republican corporate American flatulence. Gore’s Peace Prize momentarily freed me from the U.S. media bubble, and I realized, with awe, “there’s a whole world out there that pays attention to what smart Americans are doing.”

Thank you, Nobel Committee, for noticing the good in our country. I feel like Miss Kentucky in a beauty pageant where Miss Hawaii is expected to win: surprised and elated that someone noticed--they finally noticed!—that, hey, we’re amazing too, just not in the way you might have expected. I hope history feels that way about Gore, too. I want him recorded in textbooks as "the man the world recognized for changing our minds about the gravity of global warming."