OPRAH, CRUISE, POL POT...

A few nights ago on t.v. I caught the end of the really fancy/schmancy concert that was held recently in Norway for this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinguished female African university professor whose name I've of course forgotten, but she did really important things for the environment in Kenya, so she deserves her props.

The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.

Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.

I'm serious.

Oh, and they can sing.

For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.

Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.

Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)

Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)

How does this happen?

They did their own thing, is what they did.

They went after what they wanted to go after.

All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.

But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.

There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.

Works both ways, I guess.

I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.

PRELUDE TO A COUP

Five a.m. air, cool and dark

Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps

At his post.

I run past,

Aware

Of the limp M-16

Resting against his leg

As somewhere beyond him

The newly crowned king

Stirs in his sleep

Troubled by dreams

That hint,

That allude,

To inertia

Unrest...

A trigger cocked.

His patient enemies

Rely on sleeping guards

To sleep a little longer.

All of them,

Waiting

For the day

To break