Gore Scores Second Nobel Win

Former VP joins elite cadre of U.S. laureates in literature

STOCKHOLM—In a surprise announcement Wednesday morning, former vice-president Al Gore was named recipient of his second Nobel Prize in less than a week’s time. The Nobel Prize in Literature, which will add $1.6 million to the coffers of a man already rich from the climate change scare, was largely merited by Gore’s postmodern meta-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

In a fantastic cinematic voyage, Gore’s masterwork guides the viewer between two parallel worlds: the prosaic world where kindergarteners ride to school in their parents’ SUVs and union laborers manufacture USA-made products, and the epic dream-world of Dutch children’s ghastly death-screams, their fingers stuck in dikes, and of dehydrated polar bear carcasses strewn about an otherwise pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The story is told from the perspective of amateur climatological sleuth Professor Albert, who recounts the evidence he uncovers of an imminent climate-change disaster. On the eve of his report’s publication, it is suppressed by a regime of neocon-cyborgs known as Dick Cheney. However, in a scene reminiscent of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, small suburban schoolboy Little Alan soon receives the professor’s findings from a mysterious swamp creature known only as “The Goracle.” With high tide beating against the barricaded doors of the New York Stock Exchange, Little Alan marches onto the floor of the US Senate just in time to win ratification of a costly token-treaty guaranteeing Chinese economic supremacy.

A postmodern classic to its core, An Inconvenient Truth blurs the line between truth and fiction. The professor’s account of reality is subverted by an implicit subnarrative: among his accumulation of facts and scientific data, the professor intersperses—unidentified—speculations, half-truths, even optical illusions. Moments such as,

There I was, tape-recorder in hand, the peasants begging me, “Please Dr. Albert, save our island.” And that’s when I was informed that the First Lady was innocent of all wrongdoing.

An unreliable narrator, the good professor at one moment warns of impending carbon-induced asphyxiation and is later spotted on gas-guzzling cherry-pickers and private jets. In this way the work serves as a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of truth and man’s ability to know it.

In winning the prize, Gore joins Pearl Buck (1938) and other members of an elite cadre of America’s most distinguished writers of fiction. Capping a prolific literary and film career, the Nobel award comes in addition to a Newberry Medal for The Boy Who Cried Wolf and a Pulitzer for his riveting memoirs, You Get Back Up Again: How They Cheated Me Out of the 2000 Election and Royalties for the Calculator. Gore’s next project will be a follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth: he plans to write and direct a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Much Ado About Nothing.


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