Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Declines the Honor

Around the end of every December, the news magazines start to run out of fodder. The Economist sensibly prints an edition that covers a fortnight rather than the usual week. The others tend to rely on puffery to fill out the book. Time has named a Person of the Year for decades to pad their December offerings. This year, the magazine named “You” the Person of the Year. Thanks, but no thanks. One respectfully declines.

Time picked the second person (singular or plural was unclear – a limitation of the English language), and as the cover explained, “You. Yes, you. You control the information age. Welcome to your world.” Quite clearly, the editors have not done their fact checking. This is par for the corporate course, but actually, if this world belonged to the first person singular, it would be much better managed. If nothing else, politeness would be making a comeback, and skepticism would be an officially recognized religion. And cholesterol would be a nutrient.

Besides, while 2006 has been adequate, it wasn’t really up there with 1983-84, nor 1995. It clearly wasn’t as bad as 1976, 1977, or 1978, but everyone had a bad time then. All the same, 2006 just hasn’t been the sort of year that one feels was good enough to qualify one as “Person of the Year.” It’s rather difficult to accept that this kind of year could get the prize when other extremely good years didn’t even put one in the running.

What truly annoys, though, is the company one must keep if one accepts what must have been intended as an honor. While being in the same club as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela is rather gratifying, there are other members of the club that are, well, off-putting. Adolf Hitler was “Man of the Year” in 1938, and Joe Stalin won in 1939 and again in 1942. Moving up the scale from homicidal maniacs toward mere criminals, one doesn’t want to be associated with Deng Xiaopeng (1985), Ayatollah Khomeini (1979) or Richard Nixon (1971 and 1972, the latter in tandem with Henry Kissinger). The magazine does say that it annually selects the person who, “for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.” Sorry, but one has higher standards than that.

Naturally, one welcomes the gesture, and one feels a bit embarrassed for the editors at Time. Still, they only had to ask if one were interested. A discrete, “no, thanks” would have spared everyone this awkward moment. This is what happens when one tries to publish a news magazine when there’s no news. Meanwhile, the chaps over at the Economist have had a good rest and will be back in January all the better for it. Here endeth the lesson.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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