Opinion: Ignobel?

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I am hard pressed to decide whether this is malice, or ignorance, or malice taking advantage of ignorance:

Within hours of the announcement that Al Gore had received the Nobel Peace Prize, I received this email from a reader:

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Yes the Nobel Prize was also given to Stalin, Mussolini, Castro and even to Hitler … how good a trophy can it be????

And Mr Irving Nobel …why is he famous??? … yes he invented ‘’dynamite’’ … as if it is a useful invention …’’

Where do I begin?

Stalin, Mussolini, Castro and Hitler never won a Nobel Peace Prize. All of them were nominated, yes, but it’s harder to get nominated for a Grammy than for the Nobel Peace Prize; evidently all it takes is a nomination from a ‘’qualified’’ person – like a history professor, the Internet tells me. It’s hardly more exacting saying Donald Duck was ``nominated’’ for president because he got some write-in votes.

Hitler was nominated in 1939 by a Swedish politician who pulled the nomination shortly thereafter. A few years before, Hitler, it seems, was so miffed that an imprisoned anti-Nazi writer was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize that he banned Germans from accepting the prizes.

Where, I emailed the reader, did he learn this? It was on CNN, he replied – Headline News by Glenn Beck. Now that I had asked, he wasn’t sure that someone had said they’d actually won; maybe someone had just said they were nominated.

Winners or nominees, what earthly reason would there be even to mention Gore and his fellow winners and these killer clowns in the same breath … except to try to take the shine off? Malice, or ignorance? I ask – you decide.

As for Irving Nobel … it was Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite AND founded the prizes – the latter because his obituary, erroneously printed eight years before his death by a French newspaper, labeled him ``The Merchant of Death’’ – an epitaph he obviously did not relish carrying to the grave. He left much of his fortune to the prizes whose renown and high purpose have almost obliterated ``The Merchant of Death’s’’ original notoriety. Lucky for him that he died before cable and the Internet came along.