A Prize for America’s Peace with Itself

STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- I heard the news of Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on a day when I had the pleasure of experiencing the best and worst extremes of American culture: a highway rest stop, and the Norman Rockwell museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Nobel Prize to Obama was a well-deserved gesture, in my view, but I suspect it is more about the country than the man, and to understand this country you need to wander its extremes.

I know of few places that capture both the pleasures and the perils of modern American culture better than a highway rest stop, where you can pull over to buy gas, food, drink, souvenirs, and reading material, use the restrooms, and simply enjoy a dazzling cultural extravaganza anchored in boundless consumerism. They compress into one space many excessive American habits that are otherwise difficult to capture in a single moment: gas-guzzling cars and vans, rampant consumerism and materialism, overweight men, women and children (myself included) carrying massive trays piled high with fatty foods, refrigerators with 50 different kinds of bottled water -- and experiencing all this on the rush.

On this particular stop my mission was well-defined: Use the men's room, and buy a cup of coffee. I have always been fascinated by the continuous innovation in these rest stop rest rooms, such as hot air-blowing hand dryers, self-flushing toilets, motion-operated paper hand towel dispensers, and sensor-activated water faucets. I always look forward to testing out new models that help us gauge a civilization's progress, and I was not disappointed. The gadgetry was efficient, hygienic, and technologically satisfying.

In the second part of my precise mission, I wanted to buy a simple cup of black coffee at some basic coffee stand named Pete's or Joe's or Wally's. I ended up at a coffee shop with an Italian name I could not pronounce, understand or remember, surrounded by dazzling machinery that made me think for a moment that I had landed at the Smithsonian Museum's Air and Space Museum. Regaining my senses, I quickly succumbed to the irresistible and comforting pull of consumerism and bought something called a "mocha caramel nut." Whatever it was, it was delicious, it had little to do with coffee, and it cost me $2.75.

I had no complaints, though. In just seven minutes, I touched the heart of contemporary America: Consumers on the highway! It was efficient, warm, smooth, satisfying, and slightly expensive -- and there were American flags everywhere, on hats, shirts, tattooed arms, and car bumpers. This, I asked myself, was the freedom-based, democracy-validated, over-indulgent consumer culture that American troops are defending or spreading around the world?

The Norman Rockwell Museum is a trip back into another time and mindset, the America of the 1920s to 1960s, when mostly white people lived in safe suburbs in secure, loving homes and went to war only occasionally and reluctantly, to save the world from tyranny. The master illustrator Rockwell eventually transcended his portraits of an idyllic society, and grappled with tough issues like racial integration and the Vietnam war. The best values of the idealized America he painted persist today throughout the land -- stable families, safe communities, vibrant democracy, patriotism without chauvinism, and youth's endless discovery of their world. No "mocha caramel nut" stuff in this world, just a hot cup of black coffee from grandma's kitchen stove.

I was absorbing these divergent messages of the contemporary highway rest stop and Normal Rockwell's America just as the Nobel Peace Prize committee honored Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," and, because, "his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

Yes, I thought instantly, this was an appropriate prize. Core American values are indeed shared by most people in the world, and Obama's words and some initial deeds say the USA will now engage the world primarily through diplomacy and dialogue, rather than sending in the Marines. Shifting the strongest power in world history from a path of reckless military adventurism and political exceptionalism to a policy of negotiating and strengthening the rule of law for all -- as Obama has started to do -- seems to me a policy worthy of a prize and much praise. The prize does not honor Obama's achievements, because he has few to date. It honors America's starting to come to its senses, to reconcile its values with its domestic and foreign policy, and to make peace with itself, above all.

This is good for world peace and security, and it will transform the United States itself. Obama's America will end up somewhere between the romantic nostalgia of a Rockwell painting and the unsustainable excesses of highway rest stop consumerism that can only be perpetuated by endless foreign militarism.