Hating the U.S.

The Literary Saloon writes of Harold Pinter's receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature:

It will, again, be a controversial choice, in particular because of Pinter's recent anti-war writings. Indeed, it's hard not to see this also as yet another Nobel signal that they really disapprove of the Anglo-American handling of all things Iraq (as the IAEA getting the Peace Prize obviously was). But Pinter is a globally acknowledged significant playwright, and there will be fewer is-he-worthy-debates than there were with Jelinek.

Yeah, the Swedes hate us. And while I've at least heard of Pinter, I'm not sure this is great literature:

Democracy

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

Harold Pinter Februrary 2003

(It's under the rubric War Against Iraq?). And let's not even start with his politics. He really needs to read Sasha Abramsky.

Update
The Times (the real one, not the one we read in the US) wrote,

Pause for thought
Harold Pinter and the Nobel Prize for ...

. . . The Nobel Prize . . . for Literature . . . to Harold Pinter . . . Hmmm . . . there are two possibilities. First, the Nobel committee may have ruled that 2005 was the ideal moment to honour a man who wrote his signature works in the late 1950s. To be fair, Pinter produced notable plays in the succeeding decades. But he made his name, and gave birth to the adjective Pinteresque, with the stripped dialogue, edgy mistrust and air of tangible but mysterious threat of his early works.

Then there is another possibility: that Pinter is just about the biggest and sharpest stick with which the Nobel committee can poke America in the eye. His recent output has consisted almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict.

(via AMERICAN FUTURE)