And tonight's winner is...the American dream

“The Merchant of Death is Dead”. As the legend goes that is the headline that changed Dr Alfred Nobel’s life. When a French newspaper prematurely published his obituary, the good doctor was confronted with a vision of how the world would remember him. As the purveyor of the finest instruments of mayhem and murder. The inventor of torpedoes and dynamite. The original Lord of War. Now, no man wants to be remembered as being bad. Not even the bad ones. So the doctor dedicated a mountain of money to pay for a massive PR makeover. The greatest reinvention the world has ever seen.

So it only seems fitting that President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the phoenix of that 20^th century hope machine — the U.S. of A. He is Team America without the irony. He is the reinvention of the American dream. Now, some may sneer and say that the American dream is a con and it never really existed. And they are right to a point. But for all its hypocrisies, the American dream gave us universal suffrage in a time when most of us were busting our balls under feudal law. It inspired 30 million people to cross the ocean in a time when most people didn’t travel to the next village. Even today a million new people become US citizens every year, hoping to be part of the American story. It was the American dream that saved Europe from imploding and rebuilt a continent under the Marshall Plan. You only have to compare BMW to Trabant to understand what a great achievement it was. The American dream built Hollywood, put a man on the moon and took us to cyberspace. But like every dream, it looked like it had reached its sell-by date. It grew stale with Reagan, Bush and Clinton and rotten with Bush II. Bogged down by Star Wars, Iran-Contra, Cigar-girls, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, Enron, Lehman and toxic loans. By 2008 it was all but broke. Hated by many and written off by most. Cash-strapped and maligned as stupid fundamentalist bullshit, the American dream was on the ropes. But like any good Hollywood movie, it was when all was lost, when our hero looked like he could take no more, that the script turned. Like Nobel standing with his legacy before him, written in black and white, things changed for the American dream.

A whole bunch of supposedly conservative rednecks went and did the last thing we ever expected of them. They put a black man in the White House. Even when offered a war hero, a man who fought for the red, white and blue, they chose a leader because he was the right man for the job, not because he looked like them. A testament to the skill of Obama and the will of the American people. So it doesn’t matter if Obama was only in power for two weeks when the nominations closed for the Nobel Peace Prize, he had already given us back our belief in the American dream the day he was elected. A dream that says even when you’re at your darkest hour or when the flames of hate are licking at you like a summer day in Hades or when you’ve poked so many holes in your vessel that a sea of misjudgement threatens to drown you, there is always a chance to reinvent yourself as something shiny and clean. Even a merchant of death can become a broker of peace.

And tonight’s winner is … the American dream.