Years ago when I was working in Costa Mesa, Calif., at Hermano Pablo Ministries, I vaguely recall sitting at the lunch table and listening to mostly Mark carrying on about whatever. Although I really don't remember, it might have been Mark who was talking about the Noble Prize and perhaps discussing its role as a vehicle of humanistic philosophy. Humanists tend to be atheists who do not believe in the existence God and thus do not perceive the role of Christianity in the awakening of mankind. Humanists tend to be spiritually blind and unable to understand certain spiritual matters. So Mark or someone was talking about this perhaps. I heard later that Mark and Carol were fired. I doubt that the comments denigrating the Nobel Prize were the cause of his firing however. After all, here in the United States free speech is protected whether or not you agree with whatever Mark is saying. It was more about the spying activities that they had coordinated, the wiring that Mark had rigged to eavesdrop on every telephone conversation in the building and that sort of thing. That I didn't know anything about until much later, after they were fired. I was not on the "inside" of that conspiracy you might say.
As for the Nobel Prize, I suppose that it is nice that they have such a high stature prize financed by some Scandinavians who like to recognize oustanding contributions to the world in areas of science, literature, economics and politics. That's nice. However, it would be somewhat naive to assume that there is not an internal politics to that. I suppose that Scandinavian prize-givers would tend to reward those who cooperate with their Gothic Vandal view of the globe, and obviously lots of people would be impressed with that dazzling gold medal even if the values it represents would tend to be of the green-blooded troll variety. I see that someone has already designated Swedish people as being frigidly cold and Max was expecting me to copycat that even though I had not heard that in the first place. It is just assumed that I know all about everything and mindlessly repeat things of which I was not previously aware. Brrr!
U.S. Nobel winners in the literature category have included Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toni Morrison. That's nice.
Someone was saying that U.S. authors are not producing anything of Nobel quality nowadays so the Nobel Prize will not be coming here for a while. Where are the "Grapes of Wrath" and the "Sound and Fury" books representing a true ethos of the nation?
Ha ha ha! Of course, the notoriety of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" was rather inconvenient for us. It was published in 1939, long before my Texas grandparents made the trip west to California during World War II to find jobs in the canneries. Thus any similarities to the book are only superficial and coincidental, never mind that there also was an "Uncle John" in our family and that there was a journey by automobile along the highway from Texas to California. The book was already out there, a nuisance to be avoided and shot down whenever possible, long before the green-blooded trolls of Scandinavia bestowed upon it the highest of literary honrs, the Nobel Prize, in 1962, thus perpetuating forever this perplexing mix of fact and fiction.
