Harold Pinter acknowledgement speech

[Occhidiangela]

harold pinter's nobelprize speech

Harold Pinter, this years nobelprize laureate in the category literature, launched a quite anti-American and anti-British address as his acknowledgment speech.

Judge for yourselves.
Greetings, Fragbait
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Let's take his own words and apply them to his speech.

In 1958 I wrote the following:  "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Funny, his writing is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, as measured by his own yardstick. :whistling:

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Based on his opener, he'll never know, having hanged himself by a metpahysical rope to begin with. How does he get along in the world, never knowing whether the petrol he is pumping into his car is really there? /sarcasm off (I realize the question is rhetorical.)

Bottom line up front: Bless his pointed little head. :rolleyes: He writes well.

His rant/speech is the song of yet another disappointed choir member who once sang the Internationale in full voice. He wins a literature prize, well done indeed! *applause* B) Like many artistes and entertainment notables, he uses his award to act, for a moment on stage, as an allegedly objective moral arbiter, regardless of his own bias -- which is well established in his previous, and very public, political activism.

He chooses to forget, in his bitter and biting critique, to weigh the alternative outcome of the Cold War. Rather than that, he excoriates the "winner" (loaded term that :rolleyes: ) for not having been perfect, for failing to get through 40+ years of The Great Game without defect, without error. Bless him for his conscience, but "it's not the critic who counts." And as rich as "The West" is, it can't afford zero defects.

He confesses to intellectual laziness, in his comment on "we are not sure how they got there" regarding his accurate assessment of where America has military people stationed. If he had bothered to read any open source publication of the US National Security Strategy (less than 50 pages last I recall) over the past 20 years, he'd realize the so-called veil is of his own making: he chose to remain ignorant of easily accessible information for his speech's purposes: he pretends to ignorance. Who else is as transparent about policy as the US? Given his long record of political activism, I suspect he is more than familiar with public policy pronouncements of that nature: heck it is his topic at hand!

If he'd read Kaplan's Imperial Grunts, he'd note that his assertion regarding little versus "big war" is false, and specifically has been for the time period he covers. His characterization of "little wars" is well made, and anyone in a "little war" will tell you it is a war, and that it sucks. This point hits in the bull.

The spike that is Iraq clouds his vision: it provides a veil of his own construction. This (artificial ?) myopia hampers his critique on policy, though on other points he scores very well.

He's been writing plays, poems, and stories for decades; apparently very good ones. By choosing to overlook the simpler workings of geopolitics, his speech ends up as incisive commentary marred by clumsy (and I suspect deliberately adopted) ignorance. He plays the same game he pillories with his commentary. I will guess this artifice is the byproduct of his embedded positions taken in his political activism.

In his defense, and one of his better made points: since WW II ended, his chosen frame of reference, the US has gotten in bed politically with a whole crew of unsavory characters (governments) to achieve various ends. Funny old thing, that point of reference of his, him being a Brit. Please pardon my suspicion of yet another whinge from the impotent "has beens" of geopolitics: the British intellectual class.

As to disappointment for the details of geopolitics, macro style: it is a game you play to win. There are no time outs. There isn't even a game over.

He saves his scorn for Reagan and Bush in this speech, yet gives a complete pass to Clinton's leading NATO in a 71 day attack on Serbia, which was energetically encouraged by, among others, the PMs of France and the UK. I wonder why that is: Dealing with an incomplete deck? Forgetting that play is continuous?

He has made very pointed comments on that mess before. Why the omission in this context, given his chosen frame of reference and the time he took to loose a quiver full of arrows of scorn? (From the Harold Pinter website: His most recent speech was given on the anniversary of NATO'S bombing of Serbia at the Committee for Peace in the Balkans Conference, at The Conway Hall June 10th 2000.) He appears to reserve his scorn for UK and US governments, giving the rest a pass. Sorry, that dog won't hunt.

Unlike his books and plays, which end, the clashes of titans and dwarfs on the geopolitical battlefield goes on 24/7 no matter how he or I or any other oberver would wish to divide the clashing up, to put into chapters the apparently completed and related sets of events and skirmishes.

On another point he is absolutely correct: political discourse and commentary is embedded with falsehood, chicanery, smoke, mirrors, misdirection and partial presentation of facts . . . to include his own. America didn't invent that, nor did Britain. A less critical reader than I might be led to believe that only the US/UK cabal is playing the shell game in public policy utterances.

Insofar as his perceptiveness, he chooses to underestimate the discontent in America over the entire process under which Pres Bush embarked on the War in Iraq. Appears to be deliberate tunnel vision again: there is no shortage of material on that matter. I get the feeling that he, like President Bush and his War Council of 2002, "hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." Given his long and energetic participation in political activism, he appears to have fallen in love with the sound of his own voice, his own soundbytes.

Pinter plays the same rehtorical game Bush (both of them, really) did with Saddam: set up a single individual as the avatar of evil/wrongness. He overlooks a chance to scourge, for example, VP Cheney or the many folks who made a mess of the "Saddam in Exile" effort, and yet spends time and prose on a self-masturbatory fantasy game of writing an idiot's speech for Pres Bush. Time badly spent, words wasted. A pity, given his superb prose.

He raises a chicken little game of where US nukes are aimed. *Snort* Harold, worry not, they aren't aimed at your precious UK. :P He also misses a fact or two on bunker busters, which Congress rejected funding for this year (yay!) but his carelessness with fact has already been established earlier in his speech, and in his rhetoric over the years. Pot calls kettle black, given that his premise is the general falsehood and "smoke screen" of political discourse.

The anecdote he provides about Nicaragua reveals his approach to, and his tunnel vision view of, the dirty, deadly earnest global game of power politics: a game that Europeans invented and the Brits perfected long before the US tried its hand. More "has been" whinging, but to his credit, he's made a living out of it. B)

In the process of cleaning up Europe's centuries of garbage, and in trying to play at the game as the rules keep changing, America has gotten its hands filthy. America has been heavy handed in Latin and South America since T Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson opened the policy door to embryonic imperial ambitions. He and I would agree on that were we to share a pint. :whistling: I wonder if the Chinese will get as dirty, in 50 or 100 years, cleaning up our geopolitical garbage. :P Since they don't waste as much energy in hand wringing, maybe they'll just clean off their hands and get on with it, and hence do it more cost effectively. ;)

On the bright side, Harold Pinter writes very well. I found the speech easy to read and well constructed to make his point, which he took the time to get to based on his format and audience: acceptance speech turns bully pulpit. He pounded his point into dust for the entertainment of the predictably receptive audience of elites, for whom he crafted his speech. All in all, when it comes to the written word, Mr Pinter is a craftsman. :) I wish I had a tenth of his talent.

Occhi