A wise man told me there's something you should know
the way you judge a man is you look into his soul
and you'll soon see everything. ...

If ashes are ashes and dust is dust
at our journey's end, then we return we must
to the sands of the shore
White doves in flight, peace to all
but tell me why the peacemakers fall
Must we bury anymore?

A hush stilled the crowd as the horse rode by,
black lace veil hid the tears from her eyes
and we all wept in silence
How many times must good men die?
How many times will the children cry?
'till they suffer no more sadness
Oh, stop the madness
Oh, stop all the madness.

 
          "Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.""

          My first instinct upon hearing Albert Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 2007, was to write pummeling him both from the Left and Right of the American political spectrum, but now I see that was many peoples reactions from different opposing ideologies as well. Since many have said such things numerously already, and eloquently, there is little point in rehashing or restarting it here.

          It bothered me so much personally to have such a negative reaction because I for many years aspired to become a peacemaker. (Their leather costumes are cool, and they have guns that shoot "little yellow balls of light"-John Crichton. (OK, to look up that quote, I found out it is actually the "Peacekeepers" not "Peacemakers" who have the cool costumes but that is nothing that a good costume designer like Bob Mackie couldn't fix.)) By any objective look at the aim and purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize, Albert Gore not only comes up far far short, but nearly anyone, if looking at the past or present alone, should be scratching their heads thinking, WTF?

          At a time when the United States is not only engaged in multiple wars at once, having become the aggressor nation in one or both, and all "serious" candidates to become the "New Decider" promising to, or not ruling out starting new "pre-emptive" wars, where does "Citizen Gore's" environmental crusade rate as anything meaningful on a scale of world peace? Is this a "Pre-emptive" Peace Prize in an age of the US declaring itself free to launch unlimited and unfettered by International Law, "Pre-emptive" wars?

          Is this a bunch of Scandinavians attempts to "interfere" with our sacrosanct, and unquestionably honest, and 100% free from corruption or foreign influence, process of cherry-picking our next president? That may seem far fetched to some, that any foreign governments or NGOs outside of Israel (not that they try to do that, or, in a Seinfeldian quote, "Not that there's anything wrong with that...") would wish to tip one way or another who gets selected to run for the President of the United States. But what else other than a wish to interfere in our pure and wholly uncorrupted decision making process for our highest office could make a "Citizen Gore" and not a "Candidate Gore" worthy of a "Peace" prize? Nothing as far as I can tell.

          To buy into the official explanation, that the world's environmental crisis looming will trigger wars and further endanger the peace, ...someday, is this greater than a present time when larger numbers in the United States (not to mean to keep bringing this up, but it is where Gore is from) in the mainstream press, the clergy, and the would-be elected officials themselves talk about World War III (or IV) as an almost inevitability which is not only desirable, but good for the economy, and good for world peace as well? In an Orwellian sense, in the US at least, War Is Peace has become an accepted fact of the Beltway "conventional wisdom," which claiming so on TV will get you s---loads of money if you can stomach it later.

          But yes, giving someone actually working for peace against this mentality, it would be too little to late. We must look to the "future," should there be one, and "Citizen Gore" is full of it, the future that is. He is setting our sights beyond "Oil Wars" to "Water Wars" and more. Fair enough, but what is he doing to prevent them? What has he done to prevent them if he is all retired now from being exhausted by having done something before to prevent them?

          Yes, like Paul Revere, he has sounded the alarm. We should be reducing our carbon emissions, using biodegradable packaging, separating our trash, etc. One million Iraqis dead since the newest war of choice, new Berlin Walls going up in Iraq and Palestine, war related famine and disease, but hey, even "Citizen Gore" said, that might be a bad thing too. He even sort of said a new eminently preventable War in Iran would be a bummer too, unlike his fellow mainstream Democrats, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.

          Am I mocking our Holy Gore? Am I deriding someone who has dedicated his life to the service and betterment of others and his country? Am I suggesting he commit himself to the humiliation of running for President in a country whose press has pounced upon and tried to ruin the life of a 12 year old boy for having suggested that other kids deserve to get life saving transplants like he got even if they can't afford it, that same press that also would not stop tearing Saint Al to pieces the moment he announced he would run, not that they are not doing so now, just in case he should forget his place?

          Certainly not, or not on purpose anyway. Decisions like that are up to the Decider. I know that whatever his motivations, the environment is the big issue, probably the biggest issue which will define the even bigger issues of the economy and of wars, and how they interrelate. For now the worlds economies are based around war as the solution for environmental problems, and those wars will further destroy the environment, if not completely destroy it. It would make far more sense to give an environmental prize to a peacemaker than it would to give a peace prize to an environmentalist. "Citizen Gore" is no peacemaker. Whether "Candidate Gore" is more than just a hope of meddlesome Nobel selection committees, and much else of the world outside the United States, that is in the hands of the other Decider, or the Great Decider (or the Great Pretender ("Who started out so young and strong, only to surrender"-Jackson Browne).

          This is a difficult time for me personally. I was abruptly awakened from a deep worried sleep by a phone call, only to find my mind was stuck on a phrase I wrote many years ago. Its strange to find that your mind is still working when you are that tired and out of it. Stranger for me to think it is going over things as seemingly as unimportant as words. Now, on a more personal level, words are less important, but what they trigger, or fail to, or fail to prevent, they are never unimportant. The conceptual and the actual are intertwined, always.

          The phrase was "our nature of cherishing borders." It is to me key to many things. The dividing lines between us and them in ones own country and between other countries are always the flashpoints, they are as conceptual as the walls which make us feel free to make fun of and see the person next to us as "the other". And they are lines in the sand, and lines on maps. The "border" it was about though, is the border between life and death, the dividing line my mother is crossing now. All that that has dredged up positively and negatively, images, memories, and moments in time, and I discover when getting a call in the middle of the night with news, my dreaming is about... words. The full stanza I had to look up and finally decided to write this post out. I put that one and the one after it below.

 
The past is a mask
hiding the face of the present
as it tumultuously shakes all present order
leaving us to gape
and assign values to its fury
attesting to our nature of cherishing borders

What is is the facade
of forces which enable it to be
and this effrontery of seeming irrefutability
lacks the definition of tangency
and the perspective of eventual ends
stripping all our understandings of credulity