With all the controversy surrounding the announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, I found myself drawn to searching the catalogue of past recipients and to parsing the reasons and motivations that might have led the Nobel Committee in Norway to this year's conclusion. Here's one:

He will receive the Nobel Peace Prize today because he, too, has become a witness for truth and justice. From the abyss of the death camps he has come as a messenger to mankind - not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement. He has become a powerful spokesman for the view of mankind and the unlimited humanity which is, at all times, the basis of a lasting peace. Elie Wiesel is not only the man who survived - he is also the spirit which has conquered. In him we see a man who has climbed from utter humiliation to become one of our most important spiritual leaders and guides. The Nobel Committee believes it is vital that we have such guides in an age when terror, repression, and racial discrimination still exist in the world.
-- Presentation Speech in 1986 to Elie Wiesel, by Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

A guide, ergo a light and an example. A voice whose particular concerns translate into a universal doctrine of humanitarianism.

That was 1986. Five years later, different words for another laureate. Not only would a young rising star join the firmament of Nobel-graced greats, this one would also add to a select club of laureates forbidden to recieve the prize in person -- after Carl von Ossietzky (ill in a Nazi concentration camp), Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa.
It had been only two years since Aung San Suu Kyi burst into Burmese consciousness. Her first political act was born in fire; in the heated summer of 1988, amid the mass and already bloody demonstrations in Rangoon, she wrote an open letter to the government calling for a consultative committee of respected independent persons to lead the country into multi-party elections. Two day later, she stood before the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda and addressed thousands. Hers was a political program based on human rights, democracy and non-violence. Within a year, in July 1989, she was placed under house arrest. But by then her party, the National League for Democracy, had congealed into a force, the better to contend with a military junta that had transformed itself on Set. 18, 1988 into a 'State Law and Order Restoration Council' (SLORC -- often confused with drones, robot councils or any of various oxymoronic state ministries in Orwell's 1984).

Of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Chairman Francis Sejersted said this:

For a doctrine of peace and reconciliation to be translated into practice, one absolute condition is fearlessness. Aung San Suu Kyi knows this. One of her essays opens with the statement that it is not power that corrupts, but fear. The comment was aimed at the totalitarian regime in her own country. They have allowed themselves to be corrupted because they fear the people they are supposed to lead. This has led them into a vicious circle. In her thinking, however, the demand for fearlessness is first and foremost a general demand, a demand on all of us. She has herself shown fearlessness in practice. She opposed herself alone to the rifle barrels. Can anything withstand such courage? What was in that Major's mind when at the last moment he gave the order not to fire? Perhaps he was impressed by her bravery, perhaps he realised that nothing can be achieved by brute force.

Violence is its own worst enemy, and fearlessness is the sharpest weapon against it. It is not least Aung San Suu Kyi's impressive courage which makes her such a potent symbol, like Gandhi and her father Aung San. Aung San was shot in the midst of his struggle. But if those who arranged the assassination thought it would remove him from Burmese politics, they were wrong. He became the unifying symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to those who are now fighting for a free society. In addition to his example and inspiration, his position among his people, over forty years after his death, gave Aung San Suu Kyi the political point of departure she needed. She has indeed taken up her inheritance, and is now in her own right the symbol of the revolt against violence and the struggle for a free society, not only in Burma, but also in the rest of Asia and in many other parts of the world.

We ordinary people, I believe, feel that with her courage and her high ideals, Aung San Suu Kyi brings out something of the best in us. We feel we need precisely her sort of person in order to retain our faith in the future. That is what gives her such power as a symbol, and that is why any illtreatment of her feels like a violation of what we have most at heart. The little woman under house arrest stands for a positive hope. Knowing she is there gives us confidence and faith in the power of good.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader rather than the woman, was born of promise. Her vision had yet to stand intact with time. Her flame endures, even as her supporters develop new strategies and thinking, exploring other paths to freedom, turning away, with pragmatism, from the headiness of toppling their goverment from the streets and working instead for the slower, patient incremental evolution of society.

The prize to Suu Kyi mattered not only for turning attention to Burma but also to vindicate the legitimacy of her struggle. It mattered because onto her it passed a torch that fuels itself on the power of human agency to alter history. On the wings of that belief, societies the world round were choking their streets with calls of change --1986 in Philippines saw People's Power, in 1987 mass demonstrations in South Korea led to political liberalization, Burma in 1988, and Tiananmen and Berlin in 1989.

And the likes of Ghandi, Mandela, Lech Walesa, Suu Kyi set ablaze with a spark the simmering of popular discontent.

Which brings us back to President Obama. If I might add my two cents, I had the initial surge of disbelief for a barely tested president who won the prize over nominees who daily risk their lives for peace and the advancement of human rights. But upon reflection...
That nominations must be in by Feb. 1 -- barely a month after the interregnum between Pres. Bush and the taking of the oath of his successor -- suggests the initial trigger was both rejection of Bush and vindication of Obama for winning on a campaign that rose above racial divides. But in the intervening eight months the nominations sit, the committee reflects, and the nominees evolve. There's more to test him on.

Barack Obama accepted his award as "a call to action," acknowledging that it probably didn't reflect too many of his own none too sweeping accomplishments. He grapples with the same issues that would have met with others in his place. He has yet to prove, eight months into his presidency, that he can vanquish any.
His approach, however, is all. It offers a clear break with his predecessor, but more than that it stands on a different conception of America, in which might is the mantle of benign global leadership. It as as valid as the Jacksonian populism of a previous president, if, from the world's point of view, somewhat more appealing for its lack of unilateralism and visible self-interest. There might after all be truth in the idea that this 2009 award to Obama is less a rejection of Bush then a tribute to the possibility and dream of American leadership in a world.
And so I wouldn't reject Norway's decision as a brand of European arrogance dictating a path to pacificism. In my travels to distant villages in the vast tumbledown slums of Africa or villages in our well loved Burmese rice paddies, I've learned that people live with similiar dreams. America isn't their nirvana but in its broader, benign manifestations, it offers them hope. It is, like Wiesel, like Suu Kyi, a guide and a beacon. We all need that.

(A preemptive disclaimer about the weird shifts in size in this post -- You are not in fact viewing this through a magnifying glass, but if you were to, and the glass were to rove around like a rabid mouse, this is roughly how it might look. Actually, not really. But you never know.)

-A divisional court in Rangoon rejects Oct. 2 Aung San Suu Kyi's appeal.

-The US announces its long-awaited policy shift on Sept 29, including an increase in humanitarian assistance and its first detailed talks with Burmese authorities. This takes effect immediately -- a day later, in New York, Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs meets with U Thaung, Minister of techonology, science and labour. Then he goes to Washington on the 30th to report on the State Department's new thinking in a Senate hearing, held by Jim Webb. He specifies that engagement with the junta would "supplement" rather than "replace sanctions."*

-Suu Kyi is reported to accept the US shift.

-Chinese authorities seek damages from the junta but block Myanmar from appearing on this month's UN Security Council agenda. Larry Jagan writes of a major flurry of Sino-Burmese diplomatic nattering, and something of a bust-up.

-Talks between the junta and the Kachin Independence Organization are in a stand-off.

-And another American finds his way into Insein prison.

It's been a heady few weeks, eh?

Pardon the long pause, fair readers. No undue respect intended. Still, all the better to accumulate in a single package a series of fits and starts on Planet Burma-- geostrategic, microscopic -- propelling us centimeters forward in a country that some have thought frozen by a magic spell of military whimsy.

About that assumption, I'd beg to differ. True the scene in Rangoon presents itself to the naked eye as little different, doubtless, to months, years previous (dishes and cell phones aside). But as my favorite poet once put it,

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Admittedly, the subject, as was John Donne's wont, was love, deep and profound and omnipresent between two parting paramours.

In Burma, deep forces of change -- geostrategic, microscopic -- are rooted in two recent events: the killing of monks in the protests of Aug-Sept. 2007, and, less than a year later, the empowerment of the people when their government hopelessly bungled the delivery of relief to victims of Tropical Cyclone Nargis.

*This was a colorful affair. Camera crews, mainly Japanese, buzzing outside the wooden doors. Inside, standing room only. The seated crowd were one-third red -- monks, and another third neon-yellow -- unidentified white folk, all stoney faced and wearing phosphorescent T-shirts that read "Burma is NOT Vietnam."

Lucky someone thought to hang a map of Asia behind Webb in case any of us were confused.

The yellow-wearers, it turns out, were conscripts of the US Campaign for Burma. At the end of the hearing, I asked a blonde why we should run the risk of comparing.

"Webb thinks they're the same," she answered. "He wanted to lift sanctions on Vietnam." And now Burma.

Ah. Didn't the hearing sway her a little, I ventured? Wasn't there a suggestion, I asked, of a rethink in policy grounded in historical and socio-economic circumstances rather than a mere cut and paste from Vietnam? To boot, at three hours long, the hearing consisted of complex, nuanced presentations from Campbell and three seasoned academics on Burma -- David Steinberg, Thant Myint U and David Williams. Webb's lengthy questioning to the panelists implied that he was, well, listening.

Less so the blonde. "No," she answered. And out she stomped.

But then perhaps the conscripts to the cause, to the cause of Burma viewed from far far far away where it looks all contrasty in black and white, well perhaps they're a bit like Rangoon at first glance: stagnant, frozen in routine. Stuck.