Battleangel

Watch the American right and their apologists work up a nice foaming at the mouth over Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize. Sorry Michelle, there is no prize for punditry and hate-mongering.

Pinter has gravitated towards political activism in later years, though he has of course always been an avid observer of society and a humanitarian. The right wing “moonbats” [1] seem to think that Pinter must have been awarded for his recent politics, so far gone is their paranoia, lack of proper context and history. Pinter’s conclusions are simply inescapable for anyone with his wit and love for his fellow man in times like these. I would be amazed if anyone with a keen gaze and a social conscience would not object to the transformation, radicalization and militarization of America that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades. As such, Pinter is not unique. There was a time when I did not care and Pinter voted Thatcher.

Pinter high points include being evicted from a party at the American embassy in Turkey for taking up the Kurdish issue and speaking at length on the topic of applying electric current to the genitals, turning down a knighthood and welcoming Bush to the UK with the phrase “I’m sure you’ll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.” [2]

More Pinter that may delight:
- Pinter Has Long Raged Against America
- Pinter blasts ‘Nazi America’ and ‘deluded idiot’ Blair
- The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal
- The War against Reason
- Carribean Cold War

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America’s God.

Far from the work for which he was awarded the prize, but sometimes, setting things right must overtake even professional aspirations. Ironically, Pinter seems to enrage the American left as much as the right. TalkLeft didn’t “care much for the imagery in the poem” back in 2003. I reckon not. But it is an imagery, and outsider’s sober perspective on the US if you will, that the left will have to come to terms with lest they be as foolish as the right they claim to oppose.