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Time's Person of the Year Is "The Protester"
Hugh Pickens writes "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on The Today Show that 'The Protester' is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. 'For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century.' The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the 'Arab Spring.' In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as 'Machine of the Year' and Earth as 'Planet of the Year,' proving 'that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person,' writes Dashiell Bennett. 'By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.'"
Or are not all attention spans created equal?
They're talking about /protestors/, not astroturf.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How batcrap crazy do you have to be to see the nihilistic occupiers who violated individual rights, living in filth, committing murder, robbery, rape, assault and call that rational and constructive?
You just say it over and over again many times.
Then you have your buddies in the press repeat it a few hundred more times.
After all that it just sort of becomes truth.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I'm sorry you can't use "Mein Kampf" as your standard measure, at least not as a measure for political center. Do you realize, that compared to the political norm that today, Ronald Reagan would have been considered a hippie. Coming out as a click head just informs me that associated yourself with a man whose brain is inversely proportional to his mouth. Sadly the world is rife with them (conservative and liberal.)
TIME magazine has one of the most illustrious histories of any publication in this country. The fact that it has degenerated into its current state is an indictment of the readership and not the publication. Its sadly had to compete with People and a host of vapid infotainment publications that has slowly bled it of its once famous gravitas. The historic images, classic images of the depression, VE Day in New York city, the launch of the Saturn V and man's first landing on the moon, the first ever images of the human embryo developing, the stories of the lives and times of people of the day from a committedly neutral editorial point of view. These were TIMEs bread and butter. I'll bet you're one of those guys who thinks that PBS news is a commie plot, yes? No?
That's saddest thing of all. A publication that tells the straight honest truth, without injecting a spin, or supporting a political view favoring a multinational corporate conglomerate (did I just see a FOX?), or even a publication that doesn't pander to a mouth breathing, knuckle dragging populace, is no longer relevant. Its an anachronism, pushed out by the serial brain farts emanating from Twitter. Its gorgeously rendered images displaced by a continuous flood of crappy, blurry, cell phone snap shots. I know, its a romantic delusion, all things must pass. It just saddens me that the foolish, ignorant, or profoundly irreverent among us, have eroded the beautiful and genteel things in life, and replaced them with fart jokes and MREs (I guess one leads to the other.)
I for one hope TIME hangs around for a while, maybe even finds its way back to greatness. Its a hope.