President Trump's tantrum is no reason to invade Greenland

     He took it.
     Give Donald Trump credit. Truly a wonder. A continual marvel of what human beings are capable of doing: the Great Pyramid of Giza, Hoover Dam, and Donald J. Trump.
     I'm serious. Despite decades of his toddler pettiness being ground in our faces, daily if not hourly, the man still manages to surprise. How can that be? Maybe because we cling to our traditional values, and confronted with someone who is an utter moral void, untouched by conscience, self-awareness or humility, the mind just rebels and insists on assigning him a notional decency he actually doesn't possess.

   Last week, Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, gave the U.S. president her Nobel Peace Prize, the latest in a series of blatant buy-offs attempting to curry favor. The Swiss delivered a gold brick. Qatar gifted a plane. Machado handed over her Nobel.
    And he took it. The irony of a man who thunders against DEI as undercutting achievement through merit, then turning around and accepting a prize earned by a Latina, hardly needs to be pointed out.
     Maybe my mind boggles extra hard at this because I'm so averse to awards. Sour grapes, perhaps, since I seldom win one. But unlike the president, I don't go out of my way trying to win them either. I have never, for instance, applied for the highest award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, because A) applying seems a waste of time; B) I know how political the award process is, being familiar with Tribune panjandrums on the awards committee and C) I am too busy writing stuff.
     Not that I wouldn't take one. From the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University. Not from any random past winner. Though it's fun to imagine a scenario similar to what played out last week in the surreal farce called Washington, D.C.
     "Hey buddy," Mark Konkol says, over the phone. "You know, I was reading another one of your hard-hitting columns and was struck, yet again, by how unfair it is that I was given the Pulitzer Prize while your high-caliber professional journalism is somehow always overlooked. So I'm going to hop on my motorcycle and blast up to Northbrook and give you mine, along with my heartiest congratulations."
     That would horrify me. I would beg Mark not to do it.
     Honors can curse as well as uplift. They're a monkey's paw. Even legitimately won prizes. I wasn't the paper's charities, foundations and private social services reporter for long, but managed to write a story on how the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants ruin people's lives. Recipients kill themselves, get divorced, have breakdowns, stop creating whatever it is that snagged the award in the first place. Not all winners, obviously. But enough for a story.
     The MacArthur Foundation didn't send out a press release tipping me off to this. I just knew it had to be so, and went looking. Because every rose comes with thorns. With honor, mitigation. In 2009, Barack Obama was abashed, almost horrified, when nine months into his first term he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He said he didn't deserve it. He was right.

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