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The value of a Nobel nomination - Jill Stewart Friday, December 23, 2005 WITH ALL the histrionics over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's refusal to spare the life of murderer Stanley Tookie Williams, the least-told part of this tale has been nagging at me like an unpleasant chore best put off until later. As we were told multiple times about this multiple murderer by multiple media outlets in multiple articles, Williams was nominated on multiple occasions -- by multiple people -- for the Nobel Prizes for both Peace and for Literature. Those nominations accorded Williams an enormous amount of gravitas. A few weeks ago, for example, Williams spoke (remotely, of course) to hundreds of kids attending the Junior State of America convention in Santa Clara. The same kids also heard from Rebecca Owens. Owens' dad was viciously cut down by Williams when she was just 4 years old. If news coverage of the junior convention is accurate, Owens was treated with respect as she discussed her struggle to cope. Williams, in his "appearance," before the teen convention, was treated with equal respect. See, a Nobel Prize nomination is so weighty that it gets a guy onto the same podium circuit as his victims. The fact that Williams wrote children's books and spoke out against the gang terrorism he helped create is nothing compared to the shining reality of his being nominated. As Alex Alonso, who runs a Web site on street gangs (www.streetgangs.com), told the Los Angeles Times in November, "The Nobel Prize nominations really catapulted his name into the media. That's when reporters started calling me." Ya think? Leave it to California politics to bring out the ugly side of things we hoped were lofty. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger figured it out. But I certainly got duped by breathless accounts of the "Nobel Prize nominee." I didn't see reality until I read something by Eugene Volokh. Volokh, a friendly acquaintance, is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA Law School -- a title that actually means something. As Volokh wrote on his Web site: "Any social science, history, philosophy, law, and theology professor, judge, or legislator in any country (plus a few others) can nominate anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize (past nominees, just in 1901-1951, included Hitler, Stalin, and Molotov)." Everybody catch that? This means that tens of thousands -- perhaps a lot more -- can nominate anyone for the Nobel Peace Prize. No criteria. Another author on Volokh's Web site, David Kopel, dug into the database maintained by the Nobel Committee and found the names of Stalin and others. The Nobel Committee keeps these names secret for 50 years. No wonder. The committee is keeper of what I suspect is a growing list of shameless self-promoters, powerful evil folk and sociopaths who manage to get nominated by the legions of fools capable of doing so. In 1951, a year now public, the Nobel Committee received 104 nominations, but far fewer than 104 people were actually nominated because the great people got many nominations. How many people are getting nominated these days, do you suppose? Two hundred? Five hundred, with grade inflation? Quite possibly thousands. Suffice to say, a Nobel Prize "nomination" has grown meaningless. Utterly. Yet according to my Google search, online mentions that Stanley Tookie Williams was "nominated for a Nobel" came up 33,500 times. How many of those Web sites, media and others explained the rules for being nominated? Let's just say it hasn't exactly led the nightly news. One of Williams' serial nominators was Phil Gasper, a professor at the Bay Area college of Notre Dame de Namur University, who quotes Karl Marx to defend his vociferous opposition to the death penalty. Another was the equally unimpressive Mario Fehr, a Swiss politician and yet another anti-death-penalty activist hoping to score a political point. To shed light on how "not news" these nominations are, blogger Patrick Frey (www.patterico.com) has launched a campaign to get himself nominated -- also for no good reason. Similarly, KFI talk-radio host Bill Handel in Los Angeles recently got himself nominated -- for no good reason. Handel explains puzzling legal issues to the public at large for a living, making him a hands-down a better choice for the Peace Prize than Williams. The message relayed by Frey and Handel is that Schwarzenegger was on target when he stated that Williams had not shown remorse for his murdering. Clearly the governor saw him as more of a showboat with faked titles than a peacemaker. Too bad the folks in Graz, Austria, who wanted to take Schwarzenegger's name off their stadium, but were beat to it by a perturbed Schwarzenegger, haven't heard the truth about Nobel Prize "nominations" in their little European town. But then again, we had trouble getting the real news here in California, one of the vaunted media centers of the world. Jill Stewart is a print, radio and television commentator on California politics. Her Web site is www.jillstewart.net.   News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards |