Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year

Time magazine has just selected its 2006 Person of the Year and the choice is even more bizarre than last year when they picked someone who was dead. This year, in a desperate attempt to inflate newsstand sales, the magazine selected everyone on Earth as Person of the Year--except me. "For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you," the editors wrote.

Why You and not Me? What have you done that deserves this honor more than I do? I was not expecting to be named Time's Person of the Year, but I certainly didn't think you would get it either. So big deal, you uploaded a few crappy videos to YouTube, updated your rambling and incoherent blog regularly, and harassed a few journalists. Am I supposed to be impressed?

Time magazine could have picked Him. He certainly did a lot this year. I don't agree with everything he did. In fact, a lot of what he did was pretty terrible. Some people think he's an idiot or even crazy. But Time claims that the Person of the Year is the person who had the biggest impact on the news and there's no denying that he had a big impact. Maybe it's because Time used to pick a Man of the Year and it is trying not to appear sexist.

So why not pick Her as Person of the Year, in that case? She did some amazing things, especially considering she's a woman. Of course, she also did some things that were downright embarrassing. Was Time bowing to pressure from conservative groups by not putting her on the cover? Was it afraid that unless she was in a burka sales of the magazine would plummet in some Middle Eastern countries?

Time could always have selected It. Inanimate objects are not disqualified since one year the magazine chose the personal computer as Person of the Year. Perhaps the magazine decided that choosing it this year would just be too impersonal. And frankly, I'm more than a little tired of people telling me that it's the biggest new thing only to tell me a week later that it's not so great. I'm exhausted trying to keep up.

If Time had said We are Person of the Year, it probably would have caused a lot of controversy. People would be asking, Is that the inclusive we or the exclusive we? That was the point Lynne Cheney was making when she asked CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "Do you want us to win?" Blitzer seemed surprised that the Vice President's wife appeared to be questioning his patriotism after they seemed to get along so well at so many dinner parties in Washington. Essentially, she was asking if the liberal media in America consider themselves to be Americans, or whether they think of Americans as you instead of us. By choosing you instead of us as Person of the Year, I think Time may have reinforced the suspicion of many conservatives that members of the liberal media aren't one of us.

I think if Time was going to choose a pronoun as Person of the Year, the best choice would have been Them. More and more people see the world as Us against Them. They seem to hate us for some reason. And lately we haven't been so fond of them either. Some people believe they aren't just different from us, with different ideas or different opinions or different cultures. They are the enemy. They have to be stopped. If we don't do something now, they are going to take over, imposing their ideas and culture on us. The funny thing is, they think the same thing about us. They think we want to impose our culture on them when in fact we are just trying to help them. I have no idea why they are so angry at us. What did we ever do to them?

If Time really wanted to choose someone who had the biggest impact on the news, the magazine should have chosen them. They had the biggest impact on our lives and not a good impact either. I wish they would just leave us alone.

Share This Post


Rate This Post on BlogoWogo

Jon Swift, Person of the Year, Time Magazine, Internet, YouTube, Weblogs, Lynne Cheney, Wolf Blitzer, CNN, Politics