Noble Prize Gets Bob Dylan!

"Nah, Nah, Nah, It Ain't Me, Babe"
Google Images

After years of eluding the Big Lit Prize, Mr. Bob Dylan was finally gotten by the Prize Committee yesterday. Expressing consternation upon hearing the news, Mr. Dylan reportedly said:

"I wish it was more meaningful, like the Noble Piss Prize, or somethin', but if I'd knowd this was gonna happen, I'd've taken worse care of myself so it wouldn't've had to've happened."

Reporters are still trying to confirm what this means and whether Mr. Dylan actually said it. As is so often the case with him, the word is as elusive as the man, as he is a man of his word.

Deva Hupaylo: Nobel Prize 'Winner'

Deva Hupaylo and Colleagues
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

Mr. Richard Irby, editor of my hometown's Area Wide News, has an article on my old friend Deva: "Deva Hupaylo started with a Salem diploma; worked up to the Nobel Peace Prize" (Wednesday, July 16, 2014). Although I blogged on this when the prize was awarded, Mr. Irby has more details:

From horse and buggy days and one room school houses to today's tech filled school rooms, many north central Arkansas youth have gone from humble, rural beginnings to distinguish themselves.

Good hook in that opening line, and another good hook follows:

But Salem High School graduate Deva Hupaylo is surely the first to have a Nobel Peace Prize on her resume.

Now that Mr. Irby has us doubly hooked, he reels us in:

"It's a medallion and it's real gold," Hupaylo said . . . , showing a photograph taken after the OPCW -- the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- was given the prestigious award on Oct. 11, 2013 . . . . "I have a chocolate one they gave us [employees]. They are preparing replicas for us . . . [but] ours will not be gold" . . . . Deva Hupaylo graduated from Salem High School in 1976, began studying engineering at the University of Arkansas because she was good in math and science and has had a long, successful career as a chemical engineer . . . . In 2010, Hupaylo, who has three grown sons, moved to The Hauge, a capitol city in the Netherlands, to work for the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons . . . . To high school classmate, Dr. Griffin Arnold, that sounds like the Deva Hupaylo he knows. "She was always very organized and determined. She has a way of making things she wants to happen. I am happy for all she's accomplished but not surprised."

Nor am I surprised at her accomplishments. Well, okay, I was a bit surprised about the Nobel award, and I wondered what Deva's precise role was. Mr. Irby clarifies that:

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons works to eliminate existing chemical weapon supplies and make sure they do not re-emerge, by getting countries to sign a treaty and give up any chemical weapon supplies they have. Hupaylo is the head of the Industry Verification Branch. She leads a division of 120 inspectors who work, once chemical weapons are removed from a country, to make sure new supplies are not manufactured. They monitor and actually inspect chemical industries in 190 countries to make sure chemicals that can be turned into weapons are being used correctly.

And Deva has some good words for our school:

Hupaylo credits Salem schools . . . . [and] some very good teachers who encouraged them, and other teachers who motivated them through "fear and dislike," to excel.

I know those teachers, too, but no names . . .

During her visit to Arkansas, she stopped in to give some advice to Salem High School's eighth grade careers class. "I told them to get as much education as soon as possible" . . . . [And she added,] "You should not be working for money. You should be working for something that you believe in, that you enjoy doing."

Pretty good advice, generally speaking, though I think that I ought to have been a bit more fastidious about money.

For more on Deva, read the full article.

UPDATE: Deva sent me a correction of a slight inaccuracy: "'She leads a division of 120 inspectors'. I don't lead the inspectors division. I have 8 Substantive Officers. We plan the missions that the inspectors conduct, while they are actually managed in a separate division."

An Old Ozark Friend's Remarks . . .

Deva

My old Ozark friend Deva responded to my report on my keynote address with effusive praise (overpraise, actually):

You do such incredible things! I can barely speak English. In fact, recently one of the reviewers for a course assignment that I turned in said I should work with a native speaker until I developed a better grasp of the language. He would have been amused to know that one of my primary job responsibilities is to take broken English and make it into professional reports.

Her anecdote reminds me of my first foreign experience, when I was living in Switzerland. I didn't learn much French or German, but I did manage to forget a lot of English. Anyway, she then added:

I'm honored to know such an intellectual as you are.

This, from a woman who was sort of awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize! If she only knew my actual worth(lessness) . . . Anyway, I replied:

You are the incredible one. I've been impressed by you ever since I've became aware of your existence . . . which was quite early. You have seen and done things beyond my ken!

I wish I had known you better during our Ozark years, but I was somewhat of a loner. I was always heading off on my own into the wilds, or pedaling my way along back roads on my bicycle, forever seeking some high spot from which I could study the lay of the land . . .

I hope I get to see you again in this life - just in case there isn't another one . . .

Meanwhile, the quotidian world allures me with its siren call . . . "Wash the dishes," it implores . . .

Old Ozark Friend Wins Nobel Peace Prize!

Deva Hupaylo

My old Ozark friend Deva Hupaylo has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize! -- as I belatedly learned Saturday afternoon (after finally setting aside weekend grading for reading the news).

All right, I'm exaggerating . . . but only a bit. The institution for which she works as Head of the Industry Verification Branch, namely, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here's a link to the OPCW Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü's statement to the media on the OPCW being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Peace.

I fired off my own statement to Deva:

I just saw the news that you've won the Nobel Peace Prize! Congratulations! Where will you keep the medal?

Okay, more seriously now -- what's your part in this? Will you go to Oslo? If not, can you at least put this on your résumé?

I'm actually rather sure that she won't be going to Oslo. The OPCW may be a small organization, but there are still a lot of directors above her who can't all go to Oslo either. Probably, the OPCW Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü is the only one to go, for he said:

I look forward to accepting this award in humility and in recognition of the professionalism of our staff, both past and present, and the strong support we have received from our States Parties.

But what does Deva have to say? I don't yet know, probably because the OPCW is very busy with the serious work of ensuring that all of Syria's chemical weapons are safely destroyed, so Deva must surely have a lot to do these days . . .

The Vautour-Hodges Theorem: Nobel Prize-Worthy Formula Nearly Formulated!

Google Images

Over at the Marmot's Hole is a thread discussing the relative friendliness of nations. I wasn't planning to participate in that discussion, but the cogs of my mental processes were jolted into motion through a query by Douglas Vautour:

DV: I would like to know what the scientific unit of measurement for 'friendliness' is.

HJH: The objective scientific unit for measuring "Apparent Friendliness" is "one smile," but the number of smiles in a particular year must be divided by the total quantity of a country's "Nationalism" for an adjusted measure of "Real Friendliness."

DV: Put that into an oversimplified mathematical-looking formula, and we'll get our PhDs for sure. We can call it the Vautour-Hodges Theorem. We'll make tens!

HJH: Sounds good to me! If you'll merely quantify "Nationalism," we'll be in the running for a Nobel prize!

DV: N(personal)=(# of times you can sing the national anthem in a metric hour)*(# of immigrants you've had deported in the previous 12 months+1), reported in units of renditions x people/hour, commonly known as an 'arizona'. True Fun Fact!: You have to have at least 560 ari to become a Minute Man. The more you know, huh?

HJH: Now, we're making progress. I concede your mathematical capacity exceeds my own. I see what you mean in your comment, but I have a question or two. Why the "12 months+1" rather than just "12 months"? That's my substantive query. What operation does the asterisk stand for? Multiplication? That's my procedural query. Yours in Nobelity!

DV: If you've never deported anyone, you'll get a score of 0, no matter how many times you can sing the national anthem in an hour, if you don't have the plus 1. and * is multiplication. Finally, my degree comes in handy.

HJH: Excellent! Now, since you're the far better mathematician, you may have the honor of putting the entire expression into a mathematical formula expressing "Real Friendliness"!

DV: I think I'm going to need government funding to pursue this further. 100,000 should do nicely.

HJH: Good idea, but since this is joint research, we'll need more like 1,000,000 . . . each. Travel expenses and photocopying, that sort of thing . . .

The Vautour-Hodges Theorem expressing "Real Friendliness" as a number is merely two million US currency-units distant from the moment that grant is granted! Nobel Prize, here we come!

Revisiting Liu Xiaobo's "Experiencing Death"

Yu Jie

Wikipedia

A little over a year ago, I posted a blog entry openly wondering about Liu Xiaobo's choice of Christian martyrdom imagery in a poem written on an anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, "Experiencing Death," from which I excerpted the first two stanzas:

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy

Faraway place
I've exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ's birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I've drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring's
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

I borrowed these from an article in the New York Times ("Words a Cell Can't Hold," December 8, 2010), translated by Jeffrey Yang (who reads the entire poem on this website), and I asked a number of interpretive questions, culminating in these final two:

Why the use of Christian imagery? I've found nothing to link Liu directly to Christianity, so how are we to read these allusions?

Well, I may now have a bit more insight through a recent NYT article by Edward Wong, "From Virginia Suburb, a Dissident Chinese Writer Continues His Mission" (February 25, 2012), which tells of the dissident Yu Jie, who has just this year gone into exile from China and moved to the United States. From this article, I learned that Yu is a Christian and a friend of Liu:

"I said multiple times before that as long as my life was not threatened, I would not leave China," he said in the two-story house where he and his family live, which belongs to a church friend. "But after Liu Xiaobo's arrest, I was tortured by the government and almost lost my life."

Mr. Liu, one of Mr. Yu's closest friends, wrote Charter 08, a manifesto calling for gradual political reforms, and was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison, a move that contributed to Mr. Liu's being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the next year. Mr. Yu, 38, was placed under house arrest in Beijing in October 2010, five days after the Nobel committee announced Mr. Liu's award, and then, in December, was detained. He was tortured for three hours.

Yu has not been a Christian so long, only since 2003, but he's been friends with Liu since around the turn of the millennium, so they've surely discussed Yu's spiritual views, especially since they've worked on religious issues together:

The two wrote together and led the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Their relationship extended through the writing of Charter 08, when Mr. Yu discussed drafts with Mr. Liu. Mr. Yu, who converted to Christianity in 2003, said he had extensive input on the part about religious freedom.

"Christianity gives me a very strong basis for my faith," he said. "I don't think that democracy can be a faith. Only a more ultimate goal would allow me to withstand all the difficulties I've gone through."

I think that this remark by Yu offers some insight into the martyrdom lines in Liu's poem above, for both are speaking of a Christian meaning in dying for one's beliefs, though they seem to stand upon different sides of the religious divide between Christian and non-Christian.

One problem is that I'm not certain when Liu's poem was written. One website says 1990, but Jeffrey Yang tells us in remarks before his reading of the poem that it is the fourth written on the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, which would put it in 1993.

Either way, neither date would have prevented Liu from revisiting the poem and reworking parts of it later, after becoming friends with Yu, but I am merely guessing, and the question of a Christian influence still remains.

Reinhold Niebuhr in President Obama's Political Theology?

Reinhold Niebuhr

March 8, 1948

(Image from Time)

Although I haven't read a great deal of his writings, I first dipped into the works of the great theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr when I was studying with the historian Samuel Haber at UC Berkeley back in the mid-eighties. My slight familiarity with Niebuhr's views was just enough to make me wonder about the extent of Niebuhr's influence on President Obama's Nobel Prize Lecture and his political thought generally, an influence that the President has at times acknowledged.

Turns out, I'm not the only one thinking about Niebuhr here. In the New York Times article that I cited yesterday, Ted Widmer noted the influence of Niebuhr on the President's Nobel Lecture:

Yet another source, to my ears, was a writer who went unnamed -- Reinhold Niebuhr, whose 1944 classic, "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness," probed deeply into the justice of war at a time when the most total war in our history was being waged. Despite the fact that he remains a saint of the American left, Niebuhr left no doubt that he approved war under the right circumstances, as Obama surely knows. (Widmer, "Obama's Nobel Speech: Sophisticated and Brave," New York Times, December 11, 2009).

Widmer's remark was published on the eleventh. The very next day, David Brooks puts President Obama in the tradition of so-called "Christian Realism" and cites Niebuhr as a precursor:

As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Brooks, "Obama's Christian Realism," New York Times, December 12, 2009).

Widmer's reference to Niebuhr's book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness might lead those who haven't read it to conclude that Niebuhr held so-called 'Manichaean' political views on good versus evil -- with "us" as the good guys and "them" as the bad guys -- but one point of the book was that we are all capable of great evil, even in the pursuit of great good. The citation from David Brooks fits with this view, and he calls it "Christian Realism" for its chastened understanding of human nature. Brooks suggests that President Obama's ethnicity played a role in his familiarity with Niebuhr and "the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking":

Obama's race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln's second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: "I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction."

Brooks would recall that quote well, for it came in an interview that he conducted in 2007 with then-candidate Barack Obama, who explained:

I take away [from Niebuhr] . . . the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism. (Brooks, "Obama, Gospel and Verse," New York Times, April 26, 2007)

Candidate Obama's summary of Niebuhr led to an intellectual discussion of the extent to which the latter had truly influenced his political thought, along with the possibility that he was merely citing Niebuhr to 'pander' to Brooks and that his truer political theology was the social gospel. For those interested in this issue, go to the Pew Forum site on "Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr," for the remarks of Wilfred M. McClay (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and the response of E. J. Dionne Jr. (The Washington Post), who agrees with Brooks that Barack Obama has genuinely been influenced by Niebuhr.

But I've said enough for now . . .

President Obama's Nobel Prize Lecture

President Obama

Nobel Prize Lecture

(Image from The White House)

I have finally watched a video of President Obama's Nobel Prize Lecture, about one week after it was given, and I've also read the transcript.

Without reservation, I find myself in full agreement with one of the President's opening remarks, that "compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize . . . [his] accomplishments are slight." Like President Obama himself, I believe that he hadn't deserved this honor . . . even if the Peace Prize has been derogated in recent years by some of its recipients and therefore confers less honor than it once did.

That said, I think the President made an excellent speech, one that, in the words of Ted Widmer, "was a most serious public utterance, delivered with appropriate solemnity, on the weightiest matter a head of state can reflect upon" ("Obama's Nobel Speech: Sophisticated and Brave," New York Times, December 11, 2009). That matter was war, about which Obama presented some hard truths, as Widmer notes:

It threw down gauntlets left and right, challenging lazy assumptions of his liberal base (that war is avoidable) and his conservative opposition (that war is glorious). It gently chided his European audience, reminding them that the remarkable achievement of 64 years of relative peace has been possible because America "helped underwrite" it. (Widmer, "Obama's Nobel Speech")

I'm not sure that so many conservatives argue that war is glorious, but I suppose that some do. Nor do all liberals assume that war is always avoidable. Still, Widmer accurately draws out several important points, so go and read his entire op-ed article if you want a quick, analytical summary of what the President said.

Whether addressing the left or the right, President Obama simply had to present a lecture explaining how war can be pursued in the cause of peace, for he was offering his remarks in response to having been awarded a prize for peace. He chose to cast his case for war explicitly in terms of just-war theory, as we see from the lecture itself:

War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence. (President Obama, "Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize," The White House, December 10, 2009)

This is a good summary of just-war theory and needed to be stated as a reminder to both left and right. Indeed, I thought that the following passages were what the left especially needed to hear:

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason. (President Obama, "Remarks by the President")

All of this is well expressed, and has to be, for President Obama is speaking primarily to his liberal-left base . . . and perhaps to an earlier version of himself, using an argument that he's lived out in his own development. I don't know if it will convince those erstwhile supporters of his, but it at least gives them something to reflect upon, pointing them in the direction of a respectable intellectual tradition on the ethical imperative for those wars whose cause is just.

The lecture has a lot more to say than what I've quoted or summarized, but much of it concerns the moral appropriateness of force in an imperfect world that we strive to make a better place.

I'd urge those who haven't watched the speech yet to set aside 37 minutes and watch the President's lecture. Open up two browsers so that you can read the transcript as you follow the lecture -- if that helps you concentrate (as it helps me).

I certainly don't agree with President Obama on every issue, and I do worry a lot about the costs of our current economic policies, as well as the projected costs of the proposed health-care system, but on the issues broached in the President's Nobel Lecture, I largely agree.

We'll now see how things turn out in this imperfect world.