Amid tumultuous times, it’s the annual moment to lift the curtain, up the lights and open the envelopes for the 16th Madeleine Award for symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.
The Madeleine is a silly-season special, served at year’s start with a soupcon of seriousness, seeking sense in sayings, signs and symbols.
The award is inspired by the late Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations (1993 to 1997) and US secretary of state (1997 to 2001), who sent diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches. Now displayed at America’s diplomacy museum, those lapel pins expressed ‘hopes, determination, impatience, warnings or warm feelings’.
For Albright, it wasn’t ‘read my lips’ but ‘read my pins’. Her favourite mistake was taunting Vladimir Putin over Russia’s military brutality by wearing three monkey brooches, representing Putin’s stance of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. Putin went ape. Sometimes the message is just too sharp, Albright reflected, judging ‘I’d gone too far’.
With no monkeying about, we turn to the minor Madeleines. The first is the OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder. This slip-up star is almost always won by a politician. The prize’s nickname is ‘The Boris’, in honour of Boris Johnson who provides the OOPS! axiom: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’
The Boris winner is South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, for imposing martial law. Yoon’s power grab—the first use of martial law in 44 years—was a gamble that crashed in six hours. The president declared emergency rule at 10:30 pm on 3 December, only to lift it at 4:30 am on 4 December after the members of the National Assembly rushed to vote to overturn the decree. By 14 December, the assembly had impeached the president, and he faces the possibility of a separate charge of treason. For conjuring up a disaster that destroyed his leadership, Yoon becomes a worthy member of the Order of the OOPS!
Next is the ‘Diana prize’, marking ‘the utility and force of photographs’. The trophy is named for Diana, princess of Wales, a noblewoman who understood that you’re nix without pix: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts,’ former British prime minister Tony Blair wrote.
The Diana goes to the photo of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being welcomed to Papua New Guinea with headdress and garb. The picture by the ABC’s Melissa Clarke is a winner, not least, because it overturns the don’t-look-silly-rule of the political minder class: never let your boss wear a strange hat or unusual costume. Context beats the minder rule. Albanese was on his way to walk the Kokoda Track with PNG’s prime minister. The image shows a cheerful leader paying homage to PNG as well as to the military legend of Kokoda.
While giving the Diana to Albo in PNG headdress, the judges point to one of the greatest ever news pix, the July photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump with his raised fist and an American flag in the background, after he’d been wounded in an assassination attempt. The photo by Associated Press photojournalist Evan Vucci is in the same class as that of the US Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II. Journalists use the word ‘iconic’ too often, but Vucci’s image reaches that rare grade. The only defences for not gonging Vucci’s magnificent work is that the Diana tends toward light, not shade, and Trump was last year’s Diana winner, for his scowling police mugshot after being indicted on racketeering charges.
Now to the George Orwell prize for double think. In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith labours in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past so history meets the shifting needs of the Party. In that spirit, the Orwell goes to Russia for creating a modern Ministry in RuWiki, to counter Wikipedia. In the RuWiki rendering of Vladimir Putin’s truth, Russian atrocities in Ukraine are merely ‘Western disinformation’.
As Foreign Policy commented: ‘RuWiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened.’ RuWiki lives the slogans Orwell describes carved into the concrete facade of the Ministry of Truth: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’
We stay in Russia for the Madeleine Award itself. Finding hope in Putin’s Russia is the mark of an award that arcs towards optimism, channelling a great Albright line: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’
In that spirit, the 16th Madeleine goes to an inspiring Russian politician, Alexei Navalny, killed in jail by the regime on 16 February 2024, at the age of 47. A fine obituary judgement of the opposition leader is that Navalny didn’t just defy Putin, he showed up his depravity, exposing the fear and greed at the heart of Russia’s regime.
Putin’s first attempt to murder Navalny was in 2020, when the lawyer was poisoned by nerve agent. Navalny survived and recovered in Germany. Then, he bravely returned to Russia, knowing exactly what he would face—a rigged trial and exile to the modern gulags. At the close of his trial, Navalny blasted the court with a favourite movie line: ‘Tell me, where does power lie? I believe that power lies in the truth.’
Alexei Navalny was a proud Russian nationalist who used his own life to symbolise what Russia should be. More than gesture, this was sacrifice expressed as greatness.