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Barack Obama - Source: Reuters -
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If you don't already know California painter Rick Norsigian you may want to think seriously about getting in touch.
Ten years ago Norsigian was ferreting around at a garage sale (what are called 'yard sales' in the US), and found two boxes of 65 glass negatives depicting landscape scenes. The owner wanted $US75. Nothing doing, insisted Norsigian, and worked the price down to $45.
A Beverley Hills gallerist David Streets now says that the glass negatives are worth $200 million. They're seminal work from Ansel Adams, a pioneer in American photography. Non-philistines will please excuse that I assigned a monetary value to what are clearly aesthetic treasures. The images are beautiful, serene, and majestic, they capture the promise of the American West, a promise still evident even a century ago.
To see how such promises shouldn't be broken, you ought to drive through parts of Southern New Jersey sometime.
Anyway, stories of unappreciated value are commonplace, as is bargain hunting. What makes Norsigian's tale especially noteworthy is the negotiation. Knocked down from $US75-45, now worth around $US200 million. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
This story emerged on the day that Barack Obama performed a similar transaction in the Rose Garden of the White House about the largest leak of classified information in US history, generally known as the Wikileak Afghan documents.
Call it a Norsigian. The President attempted to devalue a collection of objects that everyone else who knows anything about the topic says are valuable (the Pentagon knew as much because it classified them), and may alter how the war, Obama's war, is viewed in the US.
Obama says the almost 92,000 documents don't raise anything that his administration has not already addressed publicly. We know there are civilian casualties. We know there are special operations forces hunting, killing and/or capturing Taliban leaders. We know that Pakistan is a poor ally. We know the insurgents have heat-seeking missiles.
Wait. We knew that, we just preferred not to say so in public.
In fact the heat seeking missiles aspect is a canard, as explained to me last night by the Hudson Institute's Ann Marlowe. They're difficult to fire without training, and not easily concealed. Hardly the ideal weapon for insurgents.
Having said there's nothing new in the Wikileaks documents, President Obama then executes the same action as the Beverley Hills gallerist Mr Streets did, valuing something cheap exorbitantly.
The President insists the Wikileaks information supports his strategy of a troop surge in Afghanistan.
Fair enough. Mr Obama wants money out of Congress to keep funding a war that he's losing public support on, one that even leading Republicans are wondering aloud is worth the cost in blood and treasure. When Republicans start to question a war, it starts you thinking.
The Wikileaks information is in fact a grueling account of six years of America's longest war, one in which the bloodiest month in terms of American casualties was the last one.
America has been at this point before. Remember the Iraq surge? Remember how it was George Bush's last gamble? Well Mr Bush gambled, and won. Iraq isn't even talked about these days.
Mr Obama is fighting to have his war equally-ignored, underappreciated and - in the end - worth much more than anyone expected.
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