So Orhan Pamuk didn’t win the irrelevant Nobel Prize for Literature, according to “observers of the Nobel process” cited in The Guardian who say that, “given that the European Union has decided to engage talks on Turkey’s entry without condemning the Pamuk trial, some members of the Swedish Academy, which chooses the literature laureate, feel politically exposed.”

“‘If the Pamuk row is real, the academy’s reluctance is not based on a fear of being political, or controversial,’ said Svante Weyler of Nordstedts publishers, ‘but on concern that literature must not be overshadowed by politics.’”

Literature must not be overshadowed by politics in Nobel considerations. Leaving aside the completely political nature of that consideration in the first place, that’s like saying looks must not overshadow personality in Miss America. The Nobel Prize is so hopelessly wedded to trendy international academic left-wing politics as to be a fairly accurate barometer of that year’s political fads.

Consider this year’s winner, yet somebody else the intelligent reading man in the street’s never heard of, British playwright Harold Pinter. Pinter’s written exactly two plays which First Coffee^SM, who was a literature major who took courses in Modern Drama, has heard of, “The Caretaker” and “The Birthday Party” – and who still has no idea what the hell they mean.

Why Pinter, why now? Pinter because he writes obscure works about meaninglessness, which are two of the qualities seemingly required by the Nobel committee, and now because he’s a fiercely outspoken critic of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and “vehemently opposed Britain’s involvement in the war,” according to The Guardian.

In 2003, Pinter published a brainless volume of anti-war poetry about the Iraq conflict which nobody read, and in 2004 he joined a group of “celebrity” campaigners idiotically calling for Blair to be impeached. “I’m using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand,” he said.

But Orhan Pamuk, whose only “controversiality” is to state that the Ottoman Empire massacred Armenians during World War I, a commonplace observation anywhere in the world outside of Turkey – and increasingly accepted as fact in Turkish history, years ago his comment would have landed him in jail, today it rates only a half-hearted slap on the wrist – is too political.

Too political, according to the Nobel committee, which means “not sufficiently conformist knee-jerk leftist anti-Bush and anti-Blair.”

But perhaps the real problem with Pamuk is that he is actually a somewhat popular author, who writes books people can read and enjoy on the subways on the way to work a real job. That sort of rapport with the average reader is a negative, according to the highly insecure academics who dole out the award and who get a self-important snobbish rush in giving the award to completely obscure writers since it proves (to them) just how much smarter they are than the rest of us.