Commentary by Stephen Macaulay
Donald Trump, his acolytes and those who find great pride in carrying his water, no matter how fetid it may be, have claimed that Donald Trump should be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people say so. Many, many very smart people. Really.
The facts that he attacked Venezuela and has started a war with Iran will probably have but a minor pause on some of this enthusiasm, and likely lead to a rationalization that he did these things in the name of peace (although the Venezuelan adventure was, he admitted, for oil, and as for Iran, it mainly seems to be something that he thought needed to be done that Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden didn’t do (“for 47 years. . . .”)).
It should be mentioned that one of the people who put Trump’s name up for the Peace Prize is none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s “excursion” partner. Pals will be pals.
For the past 35 years there has been another set of Nobel Prizes presented, the Ig Nobel Prizes.
For those 35 years the presentations for work that make people laugh and think, undertakings that “celebrate the unusual, honor and imaginative, and spur interest in science” have been presented at Harvard, MIT or Boston University to recipients from around the world.
The “36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony” will not be held in one of those US venues — all of which, by the way, have had funding frozen by the Trump administration allegedly because they are too “woke” — but in Zurich.
The reason is as simple as it is sad.
March Abrahams, founder of the prizes and editor of the publication Annals of Improbable Research, that supports the prizes, puts it like this: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
Think of this: “unsafe for our guests to visit the country.”
“Land of the free,” eh?
Not only are the winners of the Ig Nobels somewhat, umm, unusual — last year’s winners included a doctor who recorded and analyzed the growth of one of his fingernails for 35 years and a group of physicists who “discovered a truth about the physics of pasta sauce” — but they are handed their prizes by winners of the Other Nobel Prizes. So there is a concern that these scientists of all endeavors might be stuck in a detention center where they can watch their fingernails grow.
Abrahams: “We are merely ensuring that the winners can travel and meet. Despite the current strange winds, science and scientists and the public’s love of science are very much alive and kicking in the USA.”
Unfortunately, the love of science doesn’t seem to be an emotion shared by members of the Trump administration, who seem more smitten with magical thinking.
Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, where he writes primarily for the right column.