Senator Andrew Bartlett
Thursday, April 07, 2005
 
Sealing a Nobel Prize

..…..in which I mention Winston Churchill for the second time in a week and Leonard Cohen for at least the tenth time in a year, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize and crushing the skulls of baby seals.

A comment made on my recent post on Tom Waits asked what I thought of a campaign in Canada to get Leonard Cohen awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In my response, I said I’d be supportive of such a move, as Cohen is one of Canada’s greats. He’s already been made a Companion of the Order of Canada. My response also demonstrated my lack of knowledge on the details of the Nobel Prize, which I have since tried to rectify.

However, I subsequently remembered that Canada’s annual slaughter of baby fur seals has just got underway again. I believe this is a cruel abomination that should be either banned or at most tightly restricted to a traditional indigenous harvest. It has sparked calls in Australia for a boycott of Canadian seafood (which I support, but I don’t eat seafood anyway). Maybe I could offer a deal – I’ll urge the Australian Government to support Leonard Cohen’s nomination for the Nobel Prize if the Candian Government agrees to end the fur seal slaughter.

In familiarising myself with the Nobel Prize, I discovered there are prizes for Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry and Medicine – with Economics being tacked on in 1968. In reading the list of winners, I quickly established my lack of knowledge of people in all those fields, although I’ve read books by a few of the Literature winners. I even mentioned one of them – J.M. Coetzee, who lives in Australia these days - in a post on this blog some months ago. One name I was surprised to see as a winner was Winston Churchill. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he'd won a prize for Peace, but he actually won one for Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". I figure if he can win a Literature prize for brilliant oratory, a singer/songwriter/poet like Leonard can win one too.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Thursday, April 07, 2005 Permalink
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