Time for Another Nobel Genuflection?

A CAMPAIGN IS WANDERING around select parts of the world that President Donald Trump should get the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2025. Since Barack Obama got the prize in 2009 for doing nothing, the argument is not wholly invalid. The Nobel citation claimed that Obama won for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” when he had not even settled down in the White House. There is no reason why the Nobel Peace Prize committee should not revert to Peaceful Genuflection.

But this may miss the point. Trump should get the Nobel Prize for Service to Columnists. He is a gift which keeps on giving, and I say this with the utmost respect and gratitude, just in case the now truncated CIA misunderstands. The White House has produced a headline a day to keep editors at bay. Some are effective, and some touched with the bizarre, but all have impact. Some of the so-called outlandish demands touch the right nerve, particularly those which put brakes on a free ride. No one ever asked Ukraine for quid pro quo. Its President Zelensky, whose government seesaws between defiance and corruption, knew instantly that the game had changed when Trump demanded Ukraine’s rare earths in return for $200 billion in gratis grants. Zelensky, who had claimed that this $200 billion was fiction, quickly bent as backward as a yoga guru in his prime. He invited American companies to dig for rare earths, agreed to meet Vladimir Putin and waited for the next diktat. It works.

Except when it doesn’t. Trump’s desire to turn the bloodstained Gaza Strip into a playing beach for the rich, teeming perhaps with Trump Towers and Trump casinos, is as tragic as impossible. Surely, Trump does not believe in it; he is too intelligent. No Arab state, and no Palestinian, will accept the exodus of Palestinians from Gaza. The idea is a verbal carrot for Benjamin Netanyahu, a prelude to some unclear and unexamined prospective deal. The danger is that the bizarre might defeat the good.

The 21st century calls out for a Nobel Prize in Irony. The self-appointed Czar of Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus, eager to stain the narrative of his country’s independence struggle in which millions were massacred by the Pakistan army in 1971, has permitted direct flights between Karachi and Dhaka on an airline called Fly Jinnah. In 1948, within a year of the creation of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah told a stunned Dhaka audience that Urdu would replace Bengali in official use as the national language. Bengali would not get even parallel status. Jinnah slipped from hero to villain. In the first election in East Pakistan, his Muslim League was wiped out. Language was the inspiration for the emergence of Bangladesh. Has Yunus’ brain got so thoroughly washed that he cannot recognise the dangerous echoes of history?

With Jinnah landing in Dhaka, the resistance could acquire a different momentum. The reminder is provocative. Perhaps the Pakistani owner of the airline has a long memory, and is enjoying schadenfreude. Fly Jinnah is a low-cost airline which could extract a high price from Dhaka.

A literary festival encourages diverse thoughts. A day in serene Bhopal, for a dialogue with Lt General (retired) Raj Shukla on the Middle East, encouraged me to add language to the litany of paradox. Let’s start with the Middle East. Which East is it in the Middle of? If any Asian region can be described as the middle of the east then surely it is India. Colonial names defined a colonial perspective, and we are still struggling to develop an independent language of geopolitics.

The mind wandered towards the mysteries of the spoken word. Is rehearse the opposite of hearse? Hearse is the vehicle of death, so what do we do in a rehearsal? Lift your imagination out of the plastic bag of convention and let it run.

Just in case you are perplexed by the success of English, here are a few helpful facts. Some 80,000 English words, or around 40 per cent of the vocabulary, originated in French. Old French became the literal lingua franca of the English aristocracy after the northern French, or Normans, conquered England in the middle of the 11th century. The new upper class used French to demonstrate their superiority, creating an amalgamated language that gave us Shakespeare in the 16th century and international discourse in the 20th. French could not compete because English is French, mispronounced. English is careless about purity of diction or grammar, and thereby democratic. Carelessness makes it adaptable. As the French might ruefully say: Voila!

Some notes from a recent book on my reading list, How the World Made the West: A 4000-Year History by Josephine Quinn.

– Every familiar alphabet owes something to the birthplace of secular scripture, ancient Egypt. In the Egyptian script, based on the hieroglyph, A resembled the head of a bull (alep), B was a house (bayit), D a door (dalet), and so on. Lebanese traders brought the script to Greece circa 750 BCE.

– Aristotle thought Europeans were full of spirit but lacked intelligence; Asians were full of intelligence but lacked spirit. Aristu, widely acknowledged as the First Teacher of European civilisation and a significant influence on Arabian and Persian philosophy, thou shouldst be living at this hour. So much has changed, and so little has changed. (Aristu is Aristotle in Arabic.)

– In ancient Athenian democracy, six out of seven public posts were determined by lottery; the seventh was reserved for the military. Elements of a lottery are still evident in a contemporary election. In old-world Athens women wore a veil and needed a male guardian’s sanction to travel or work, so maybe the Taliban should begin studies on the pre-Islamic past. Persian women, in contrast, owned businesses and property, ran shops and travelled freely.

The last word on language must surely be left to the inglorious pun. The Republican American politician John Warner never became famous for his five terms in the Senate from Virginia, but turned into a household name after his marriage to the abundant Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor in 1976. As the well-read reader will surely know, he was not her only husband. The stormy Elizabeth Taylor married often, and once the same man twice, which is understandable given that he was Richard Burton. John Warner, her sixth husband, lasted six years. After their marriage a caustic, petulant Democratic opponent remarked that the voters of Virginia had elected the three biggest boobs in the country.

Benjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpIsrael-Palestine conflictJohn WarnerUS politicsVolodymyr Zelensky