On Point: Living a Nobel lie

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Have the PeaceJammers gone home? Can we talk now without fear of disrupting the euphoria surrounding the gathering in Denver last weekend of 10 Nobel Peace laureates and their thousands of young disciples?

Yes, the coast is clear. So let us set the record straight on one small but hardly trivial matter. While the Nobel laureates included several true moral giants such as the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, heroes who'd earned the praise and adulation lavished upon them, they also included at least a couple of overhyped, self-righteous scolds and one outright phony.

Let's skip the scolds - they're everywhere these days, after all - and move right to the phony. Rigoberta Menchu Tum, a Mayan Guatemalan, won a Nobel prize in 1992 in substantial part because of her acclaimed autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu, written a decade before. But it turns out that the book is largely a hoax, although the Nobel committee didn't know it at the time.

Menchu Tum's fans simply dismiss the significance of the revelations. If their heroine's heart is in the right place and she has grudgingly acknowledged taking, ah, liberties with her personal history, what more should matter? Shouldn't she retain her status as a Third World icon?

Actually, no.

Middlebury professor of anthropology David Stoll provided the most detailed account of Menchu Tum's misrepresentations in the late 1990s, but a New York Times probe was damning as well. After retracing her steps, reporter Larry Rohter concluded in 1998 that "many of the main episodes related by Ms. Menchu have either been fabricated or are seriously exaggerated."

To cite just one example: She claimed "I never went to school" and had to learn Spanish at 17. In fact, she attended private boarding schools run by nuns - which in all likelihood also rules out her claim of spending eight months a year as a youth working on plantations.

Stoll writes that Menchu Tum "drastically revised the prewar experience of her village to suit the needs of the revolutionary organization she had joined." She led an interesting life, in other words - but not the one told in her autobiography and lionized by such gatherings as PeaceJam.

In defense of Dennis

And now a kind word for Gigi Dennis, Colorado's embattled secretary of state who has been under fire for weeks because of rules she wrote that closed an outrageous loophole in Colorado campaign finance law.

Yes, Dennis waited too long to spring the rules on groups - mainly unions - eager to exploit the state's "small donor committee" loophole. And true, she should have done this months earlier if the rules were to apply to this election.

But even so, it's hard to keep a straight face and argue against her purpose.

Colorado voters have said they want a level playing field in campaign fundraising and a transparent process. They've limited donations and said donor identities must be revealed. These principles aren't necessarily wise but they're embedded in the state Constitution.

Prior to Dennis' rules, however, the operation of small-donor committees mocked these goals. Through such committees, unions shoveled worker dues into politics without the permission of those making the "contributions." And thousands of these mythical "small donors" translated into big money.

As the News' Burt Hubbard reported earlier this month, the Service Employees International Union alone dropped $656,000 into its local affiliate's small donor committee in July. Does anyone seriously believe that janitors, security officers and hospital workers from around the country have any interest in making voluntary contributions to, say, Colorado legislative campaigns? But of course they weren't asked that question; nor did they offer the donations on their own.

Dennis addressed this travesty. And whatever the fate of her rules - last Friday a judge overturned them, although his decision is on appeal - something does need to be done about this misuse of union dues.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.