This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France, has a dream.
In a lecture Sunday to the Swedish Academy that awards this stunningly relevant prize, Le Clezio suggested that the Web, had it been around in those days, might have prevented World War II.
"Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded--ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said.
It is hard to find good fiction these days. And it seems even harder to go along with Le Clezio's interesting suggestion. While not wishing to waft through the odor of an overly political debate, it's still a struggle to think of just one current leader with despotic tendencies who has been deterred or overthrown by online ridicule.
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, by so many accounts (online and off), a despot to rival Pol Pot, still clings to power.
Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus is now suddenly attempting to cuddle up to the European Union because, it seems, he's not getting on so well with Russia. But the pesky opposition in his country still fails to win a single seat in elections. And he has a great name for his secret police. Yes, it's called the KGB.
Kim Jong Il of North Korea seems to be an ill Kim Jong, but no amount of Internet ridicule has made him so much as change his absurd hair. The dictator himself actually ran a successful campaign against anti-socialist hair in 2005.
No amount of online brick-batting seems to have prevented any of these or other dictators' actions, nor ridiculed them into swift departures. In fact, doesn't it seem as if dictators tend to leave the stage by dying of disease or being, well, killed rather than ridiculed?
A few manage to negotiate some pleasant exile for themselves. Uganda's Idi Amin, for example, spent his latter days enjoying cheap gas in Saudi Arabia.
But the thought that those who use oppression and slaughter as a means to secure power will be put off by Internet ridicule might strike some as vaguely ridiculous.
It is also worth considering the variable quality of information that the Web sometimes turns up. I just Googled "Ignored Hitler?" to see what wisdom might emerge.
One of the first results was a WikiAnswers page. The question asked was: "Why did world leaders ignore Hitler's genocide against the Jews during the war?"
The answer I saw was this: "I do not think world leaders ignored the genocide. However, in purely practical terms, there was probably not that much they could do, as Poland--where the main death camps were--was very inaccessible."
Oh, so that was it. Poland was a tough place to fly to. And not, in fact, as the writer and producer of the BBC's Auschwitz documentary, Laurence Rees, put it: "No one was bothered enough to make bombing Auschwitz a priority."
Perhaps Internet ridicule would have made some world leaders more bothered. Perhaps not.
Aren't you momentarily stunned when your cab driver or your shuttle driver at Hertz or your local car dealership says something that really makes you think? Don't you wonder how someone so smart ended up driving you around?
Please, therefore, consider what it must be like to be Douglas Prasher.
Prasher, or as he should be known, Dr. Prasher, makes around $8 an hour as a courtesy shuttle driver for an Alabama car dealer. And he's been stunned to hear that the fruits of his work have led to a Nobel Prize for chemistry--which just happened to be awarded to two other scientists.
A couple of years ago, Prasher was involved in a slightly different kind of shuttle--the one occasionally shot up by NASA. And a few years before that, in 1992 to be precise, he isolated the gene that makes jellyfish glow in the dark. At the time, he believed this discovery could be used to study some of humankind's most debilitating diseases. He was right.
It's just that at the very moment he made his breakthrough, his funding, which had once come from the American Cancer Society, ran out.
He could have kept his work to himself. Instead, he mailed a couple of test tubes to Roger Tsien at the University of California and Martin Chalfie at Columbia University.
"It was more important to me to hand over the tool to other scientists with the funding than to have individual glory," Prasher told London's Daily Mail.
So how did he end up driving those nice folks in Alabama to and from Bill Penney's excellent and, no doubt, munificent Toyota dealership?
"After I gave up my work on the jellyfish, I eventually found another dream job, with the U.S. space program, but I was laid off in 2006 and I haven't been able to get another scientific position," Prasher said.
Prasher has three children and, apparently, had just taken out a large mortgage when he was laid off by NASA. But is it really possible that someone with so much evident ability can't get a more appropriate position in America's scientific community than helping to shift a Scion?
It's not as if Chalfie and Tsien don't concede Prasher's role. Tsien even sent him an e-mail to apologize. But doesn't Prasher deserve something more than a little acknowledgment?
If this were a movie--and perhaps it will be--Chalfie and Tsien would visit Prasher and offer him a cut of the $1.5 million Nobel Prize.
And then, in the last scene, he would get another knock on his door--a new sponsor to finance his future research. That sponsor would be Toyota, wouldn't it?
You're going to tell me life isn't like the movies, right?
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