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A friend this morning informed me that Britain's America-bashing playwright Harold Pinter has just been awarded this year's Nobel in literature. He then asked, "What do you think he'll say in his speech?" I replied: "You mean, Al Gore didn't deliver it yesterday?"

Of course, it'd would be a livelier world if Gore were as talented as Pinter. Stuart Reid wrote about Pinter for us some years ago. The piece will be posted tomorrow. Here's a preview.

Meanwhile, my mind happily goes back to what John Simon wrote with foresight in June 1967:

It is Harold Pinter's misfortune to be an unusually clever child. At a time when the whole English-language theater is in one of its periodic stages of infancy, and the nursery is full of goody-goody toddlers, bawling brats, and burbling tykes, Pinter is just plain precocious. He has cunning, impudence, and wit way beyond his years, so what matter if his psyche is that of a baby? He is cosseted, rewarded, bowed down to, well beyond his deserts and ability to cope. If this child grows up at all, he will turn out bad.

A Nobel in anti-Americanism is about as bad as it gets.