Don't Cry For Cindy Sheehan, Alfred Nobel

Don't Cry For Cindy Sheehan, Alfred NobelBy John Burtis
After days on those rapturous tenterhooks, Cindy Sheehan, the highly touted, omnipresent, albeit picaresque peace mom, has failed in her ruthless media driven quest for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. A prize many felt she deserved.

Not that she didn't have the radical Democrats, the far left loonies, the anti-war crowd, the Dellinger descendents, Father Berrigan's brood, the few remaining Winter Soldiers, the best the fading 60s had to offer, and the rest pulling for her. But it just wasn't to be.

But neither John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Ned Lament, nor the inflationary and mystical powers of the famed peanut planting mummer, Jimmy Carter - a Nobel Prize winner in his own right for the providential nuclear arming of a starving North Korea, or was it for the coddling and nurturing of the murderous Fatah, or the atrocious gushing over that brutal island prison warden, Fidel Castro, who can really say now ? could parlay the sad, tawdry public pirouettes, back flips, and hastily written screeds of that shy shrinking violet to the rapt attention of the dynamite baron's current committee.

Sadly, it now appears to even the manifold minions of our progressive left, with the hindsight of the award now behind us, that the prize was actually given this year to a man who may deserve it.

Nope, the Prize is going to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.

Mr. Yunus has parlayed the small local bank he founded, which offers collateral free loans to the poorest of Bangladesh's poor to start small businesses, to a customer base of some six million. Interestingly, the borrowers currently own 94% of the banks equity, with the Bangladeshi government owning the remaining 4%, while 97% of the borrowers are women.

When advised of the prize, a humbled and selfless Mr. Yunus said that he would re-invest his prize money in his bank, enabling even more of his fellow countrymen to begin lives of improved economic circumstances.

Can you imagine a Nobel going to such a humble man, who devoted his life to such a decent venture, which overwhelmingly caters to women to boot, when Cindy Sheehan is setting such a beautiful example? That is when she's not slobbering all over raucous, blood thirsty South American dictators ? believers in peace, all - blocking roads, writing self-aggrandizing hagiographical narratives tinged with P.T. Barnum accounts of her own supreme importance, demanding air time to further her personal agenda, screeching about the war to end wars, using her dead son as a tool, piling prevarications atop lies on top of hokum, creating more hot house emissions than Albert Gore Jr., while waving the bloody shirt?

I can't for a second imagine that the Nobel Prize Committee, save for the one that dragged a thoroughly discredited Mr. Peanut to Oslo for his best Bob Barker in a white tie and tails, would have a difficult time finding folks on this planet who would equal or better the peace record of Ms. Sheehan. Though it now appears they have. And it is entirely possible that she was not, gasp, no, even on this year's program.

Fortunately, someone in Oslo may have noticed that Cindy Sheehan is a total creature of production. Not of hers but of the Democrats, the left, their ceaseless propaganda machine, and the willing acolytes, dupes, sympathizers and followers in the all too enabling progressive press.
Cindy Sheehan appeared at just the right time. And her story - however convoluted, riddled with inaccuracies, laced with problematic and divergent sidebars, sprinkled with outright fabrications, and littered with bunk ? was glossed over by the Democrats and the left because she provided them with the necessary, however campy and smarmy, street theater they were sorely lacking before her arrival.

Her public life, since her first public appearance, has been crafted by the entertainment industry, with camera angles, the beating of drums, long views, close-ups, second units, grips and gaffers, FX effects, of light and magic, and just plain computerized special effects.
And this sad, sorry woman has played it all out with a Vivien Leigh tragic-comedic effect, not knowing it all was just political theater and then failing to realize she could simply quit play acting, peel off her stage persona, and go home when the director, a Democratic strategist, Harry Reid, an itinerant TV personality, or the local ward boss said cut, that's a wrap.
Like an episode in the Twilight Zone, Cindy Sheehan seems doomed to continue acting the same painful insensate role even as the play ends, the viewers file out, the theater is closed, and the whole place is gradually covered in cobwebs.

Ms. Sheehan knows no other character to play than the archly grieving socialist, often Stalinist, anti-war mom, enraged at President Bush, embracing every tin horn dictator she can find, and some she can kiss, while the crowd, their attention, and the media gradually abandon her.
Meanwhile, Mr. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank will continue to aid the downtrodden in Bangladesh, in their millions, for the greater good, in a place which has never crossed the mind of Cindy Sheehan.

And Cindy will disappear from view and suffer the ennui which afflicts those who have hogged the limelight from artificially constructed contrivances and fail to understand why they now stand alone in the darkness.

Across America the fire stations are quieter. Rescue companies are no longer rushing to the homes of Cindy's now grieving accomplices, bringing life giving oxygen to those who felt giddy through that long evening's night until Norway's Aftenposten brought them the news about Mr. Yunus and his prize.

Alfred, please don't cry for Cindy.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/burtis101506.htm