Nobel Effort

Forgive my hopefulness. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. But consider the winners and topics honored with this year's Nobel prizes:

• Literature: a French writer specializing in environmentalism
• Physics: three Japanese-born scientists exploring the smallest building blocks of the universe
• Economics: NYT columnist and relentless Bush critic Paul Krugman
• Peace: the former Finnish president who spent three decades looking for a way to use words rather than weapons to settle international grievances
• Chemistry: the American/Japanese scientific partnership seeking a connection between unique proteins and the onset of illness, including Alzheimer's disease
• Medicine: shared by several, including the director of the World Foundation for AIDS research

Cumulatively, do these awards make a stark political statement on behalf of the directors in Stockholm? Is that statement a defiance of how the American right wing has diminished both America and the globe over the last decade?

Are they not saying that it is right to promote science over religious dogma? Right to question the motives and actions of the obscenely rich and the relentlessly greedy? Right to promote causes like AIDS research and environmentalism? And only proper to choose intervention before invasion?

To me, this is the coda of the Bush years. This year's Nobel prizes imply the same indictment that echos across the blogosphere in baser form: 'Bush: wrong about everything'.