Should Steven Hatfill Get the Nobel Peace Prize?

I have just read this article on Steven Hatfill, the man originally accused of the anthrax attacks in the wake of September 11.

This is an enraging, frustrating article to be sure, highlighting once again that cheesy cloak-and-dagger speculation is no match for good old fashioned gumshoe work in uncovering the facts. I was literally in tears reading how a strapping, enthusiastic, and eccentric scientist was reduced to an unemployed, disheartened shadow of himself, watching himself be accused on TV while federal agents tailed his every move.

However, midway through the article changes. We are introduced to an American who was always a bit "off," a bit of a weirdo, a weight-lifting, tobacco-chewing, rare-steak-eating, superphysician novelist who dressed in black (I like him already), who anguished over having to administer experimental drugs to animals, who tended the ailments of indigenous peoples, and who is determined to revolutionize medical labs.

I remember the FBI sweep of his apartment, and the press conference that Hatfill's attorney gave. "Guilty or not," I thought, "he is presumed innocent, and this is a travestry." Of course, I had no way of forming an opinion about Hatfill's guilt or innocence, but if we Americans rush to judgment, we may as well let the terrorists win and go back to being a colony of Great Britain.

However, I did not become convinced that Steven Hatfill is a deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize merely because he fought injustice and won exoneration. Nor do I think it because his fight was also on behalf of all of us, Americans who must cherish and uphold due process, and who must insist that journalists act like investigators instead of the government lapdogs that they have become. This is what convinced me that Steven Hatfill should at least be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize:

When he had had enough, when he was done with watching the television in his girlfriend's home (having lost his own home, any job prospects, and his health insurance), when he was done drinking a little too much, eating too much chocolate (at least he has good taste!), and feeling sorry for himself, Steven Hatfill dug out his old textbooks and began studying again, and then signed up to be part of the relief effort in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. Healing people helped him to heal himself.

He also had an epiphany: build mobile labs to be able to penetrate the remote areas of the earth, where the plants and fungi, out of which antibiotics are made, are found! The FBI tailed him to the hobby shop and back, after which Hatfill began designing his vision in modeling clay.

For Hatfill, rebuilding remains painful and slow. He enters post offices only if he absolutely must, careful to show his face to surveillance cameras so that he can’t be accused of mailing letters surreptitiously. He tries to document his whereabouts at all times, in case he should ever need an alibi. He is permanently damaged, Hatfill says. Yet he still professes to love America. “My country didn’t do this to me,” he is quick to point out. “A bloated, incompetent bureaucracy and a broken press did. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I didn’t still love my country.”

Much of Hatfill’s time these days is devoted to teaching life-saving medical techniques to military personnel bound for combat. They are his “band of brothers,” and the hours he spends with them, Hatfill says, are among his happiest. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University.

Then there is his boat.

Hatfill has committed $1.5 million to building his floating genetic laboratory, a futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an operating room to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon for undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms, he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis and other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations receive them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two years. Scientists at USAMRIID, where the FBI once suspected him of stealing anthrax, have expressed tentative interest in helping him mount his expedition.

Throughout it all, one gets the sense of a man who really, really loves his country and what he does, and whose greatest desire is to help others. He is bitter toward the government bureaucracy, but not the people of the United States who comprise the true government. His suffering was unimaginable, and yet now he's going to go on safari in his super-boat for more medical cures. He more resembles Superman temporarily weakened by Kryptonite, or Indiana Jones, than a victim of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. I can hardly believe that someone like this exists! It is a testament to how resilient the human conscience, and our capacity for creativity, really is.

It is time that journalists quit merely reporting Hatfill's lawsuits for libel, and start talking about what this extraordinary man has done and is doing. I know what reading this article did for me. It scared me and made me angry, but it also filled me with gratitude that there are people out there willing to stand up for our rights, and to reclaim their passion despite what the entire world thinks of them. Isn't that what the Nobel Peace Prize represents?

Thank you, Steven Hatfill. I doubted your guilt and applauded your exoneration, but now you are a hero in my eyes.

The New Yorker Nails It on President Obama's Nobel

How does someone who loves the Prez to pieces but naturally has a "yes, but - " attitude toward the surprise awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to him navigate between the twin shoals of gushy worship and cynical tut-tutting? The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, always a dry wit, throws this struggling captain a line:

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don't force it on you while you're still waiting for the bus to take you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don't award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling "Good job!" to a toddler who's made it to the top rung of the monkey bars.

Ha ha ha! Isn't it the truth? After watching the defensive response of Thorbjørn Jagland to questions about this choice, I began to suspect that this was really the "Congratulations for not being George W. Bush" award - which means, for pity's sakes, that any of the rest of us could have won the thing.

It's not a plastic, made-in-China "participation" trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It's not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It's not a gold star. It's a gold medal.

I'm hip to that. However, we must remember that even the gold medal itself is not always the Seal of Good Sportsmanship that it is meant to be. Let's not forget that ridiculous spectacle at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City:



Or a pensive Nancy Kerrigan pouting and stomping her foot after losing the gold - which she deserved to lose - to Oksana Bayul. (On second thought, let's forget that whole Tonya-Nancy-Oksana thing. Yes, please!)

Of course, in response to the awarding of another gold to Sale and Pelletier, the scoring and judging of figure skating was changed to make it more "fair" - so fair, in fact, that I cannot make heads or tails of it, and judging from the comments of others who watch this sport on YouTube, neither can they.

So fair, in fact, that we find ourselves looking up the good old days by watching old performances by Kristi Yamaguchi and Midori Ito*, and even the pre-1993 performances of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan (but man, did Kerrigan choke a lot - it's painful to see) rather than watch many of the skaters today, what with their "flutzes" (failed lutz - either falling off the takeoff edge, which makes it a flip, or under-rotating the jump so that the skater completes the last revolution on the ice) and "slips" (under-rotated flips). The new scoring system is supposed to award attempts at jumps but deduct for an incorrect takeoff edge, incomplete jump, and any landing that is not clean, and yet it seems to me that women's figure skating in particular went downhill after 2002.

(A few exceptions: the fiery Irina Slutskaya, who eats triple jumps for breakfast, and the lovely Shizuka Arakawa, the 2006 gold medalist, who I think could work on building more speed in her spins but completes her jumps with a confident back edge and a beautiful line. And despite her strong jumps I was never a fan of Michelle Kwan.)



Well, there it is. The award was not given, as I had hoped, to the Iranian student protestors. For better or for worse, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to President Barack Obama, who looked "abashed, even a little uncomfortable" according to Hertzberg, who adds, "the prize is won, but the peace, as always, is elusive." So it is. I don't think this honor has done much to help the current President step out of the He's-not-W shadow - that achievement, too, remains to be seen. But step out of that shadow, I believe, he will.

In other news, John McCain has requested that President Obama pardon Jake Johnson. I hope that he will.

*Both Kristi and Midori fell; Kristi won the gold. Uncharacteristically struggling to complete her jumps in the 1992 Olympics, Midori rallied, fought for the silver, and made skating history by throwing into her program a second triple axel. I love them both.