Time and Its “Person of the Year”

Once again Time Magazine has overlooked us in choosing its “Person of the Year.” Instead they went with Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swede who has be become an international celebrity as an anti-climate change activist, and we rather begrudgingly accept the slight.

With all due respect to the formidable young Thunberg, however, we don’t think she was the year’s “most influential person” that the title is supposed to recognize. She got a lot of attention and adoration over the past year, but the climate continues to change, and even such an obviously bright 16-year-old isn’t likely to influence that. Most of the world will continue to emit greenhouse gases, lest their economies crash and there’s no money left to deal with the rising tides and other coming calamities, and even in the unlikely event the whole world agrees to give up airplanes and automobiles and air-conditioning and other modern amenities to go back to the grinding poverty and stifling heat of the pre-industrial world the climate would probably keep on changing.

The “most influential person” of any given year isn’t necessarily a positive influence on the world, and Time Magazine is old enough to have bestowed its “Person of the Year” title on Adolf Hitler and various other influential villains of history, so we can think of several people who are more, well, we hate to say to “deserving,” but at least more eligible for the title. President Donald Trump tells exaggerated boasts about his Time Magazine covers — President Richard Nixon still holds the record — and for a while he hung a fabricated Time Magazine cover with his picture at his golf resorts, so we’re sure he resents being slighted for a hot and saintly 16-year-old Swede even more than more than we do.

Time Magazine goes back to the pre-Hitler days and is still somehow on sale at neighborhood grocery store, and we still mention on our resume that we had several credit lines in the venerable publication, but these days Trump and the rest of us shouldn’t be much concerned with its “Person of the Year.” The magazine is mostly read in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting room these days, and along with the rest of the venerable print media its influence is waning in this post-Gutenberg age. Our guess is that Greta Thunberg will be soon forgotten, and Trump will be long remembered, fondly or not.

— Bud Norman

The Persons of the Year

Time’s “Person of the Year” isn’t President Donald Trump, which surely annoyed him, and he was surely further annoyed by the choice the magazine made. This year’s pick is the “Silence Breakers,” as Time calls all the women who have come forward with tales of inappropriate sexual behavior by prominent men.

That includes the dozen or so women who are still accusing Trump of the same behavior he boasted of in that “Access Hollywood” tape, as well as the eight women who are accusing Trump’s favored Alabama senate candidate of pursuing them when they were teenaged girls, but it also includes a countless number of women alleging bad behavior on the left. This year’s long, long list of men whose reputations and careers have been damaged by allegations of sexual misbehavior also includes several Hollywood heavyweights, some well-known figures in the liberal media, and a couple of once-revered Democratic politicians.

After 52 years Michigan Rep. John Conyers was congress’ most long-serving member, and the beatings he endured during the civil rights crusade and his founding role in the Black Congressional Caucus and a long record of legislative activism had made him a saint-like figure in the Democratic party, but even he stepped down this week after a spate of accusations of sexual harassment by former staffers. He was allowed to do so for plausible reasons of deteriorating health, and it looks as if either his son or nephew will inherit his seat, but his future biographers will have to acknowledge that his career came to a disappointing end. Former comedian and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken was similarly lionized by the left because of his impeccably liberal voting record and harshly anti-Republican rhetoric, and was even considered a contender for the party’s presidential nomination, but a series of women claiming that he had forced kisses and gropes on them have left his career in doubt. By Wednesday most of the Senate’s Democrats and all of the Democratic women in the chamber were calling for his resignation, with Minnesota Public Radio reporting that he would resign today during a scheduled announcement, and although Franken’s staff has “tweeted” that he’s still undecided it’s clear that he won’t be the party’s presidential nominee.

Some prominent Democrats are even apologizing for their support of once-beloved President Bill Clinton despite all his indisputable hound dog ways, and with the support of such media as Time magazine and all those networks and publications that have recently defenestrated prominent men they seem set on a zero-tolerance policy for misbehaving men. It’s such a shrewd political move, especially given that anyone Clinton has outlived his or her usefulness to the party, and that Conyers had clearly grown too old and Franken was always one of those celebrity politicians whose shtick soon grows tiring, that we assume some cynical motive. We nonetheless give some begrudging credit to the party for taking this sensible stand, and wish the Republicans would do the same.

For now our once-beloved Republican party is stuck with Trump and his boastfully hound dog ways, though, as well as that Alabama Senate candidate who sure sounds a a lot like a child molester to us and a lot of other people around the country. Trump and the talk radio talkers and the rest of the modern day Republican apparatus will continue to feign great indignation at the allegations against any Democrat, believing every word the women coming forward might say, but they’ll continue to insist you just can’t believe any woman who might say the same thing about a Republican. That worked well enough back when the Democrats were defending their guys and believing any woman who made allegations against Republicans, but the Democrats’ shrewd move makes that harder to pull off.

There’s no telling for sure, of course, but our guess is that most of these “Silence Breakers” are telling the truth, whether they’re breaking the silence about either a Democrat or a Republican. Some of them are bound to be lying, sooner or later, but the truth has a way of eventually asserting itself. Our experience of working and living in America tells us that men do often misbehave badly, and it takes a cynical political calculation to make that less common we’ll take it.

— Bud Norman

That Uncertain Time of the Year

For some reason or another Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue always gets some amount of attention, even though it’s the only time other than a dental appointment when you’re likely to be aware of Time Magazine’s continuing existence, and this year they have designated Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel for the honor. By now it’s no bigger a deal than an Academy Award or a Nobel Peace Prize or any of the other once-prestigious titles, at least as far as the average person is concerned, but it’s always a reliable indicator of what the more important sorts of people are thinking.

In this case it’s clear they’re thinking that a massive influx of immigrants from the most troubled parts of the world is just what western civilization needs to maintain its economy and sense of self-righteousness. Merkel didn’t get such profuse praise from the press when she took power as a center-right alternative to Germany’s previous more liberal leaders, and certainly not when she was wisely rejecting President Barack Obama’s pleas for a coordinated stimulus effort to revive the world economy after the 2008 recession, or when she was stubbornly insisting that Greece’s latest bail-out come with harsh conditions of fiscal rectitude, but now that she’s insisting Germany and the rest of Europe welcome millions of refugees from the Middle East’s wars and general inhabitability she enjoys a newfound respectability. Her stand on immigration is not popular in Germany, or anywhere else in the western world, but that impresses the editors of Time Magazine all the more. “She is not taking the easy road. Leaders are tested only when people don’t want to follow,” the article enthuses, “For asking more of her country than most politicians would dare, for standing firm against tyranny as well as expedience and for providing steadfast moral leadership in a world where it is in short supply, Angela Merkel is Time’s ‘Person of the Year.'”

It seems to us that Merkel is asking her people to surrender their country to an incremental invasion by a markedly inferior culture, that her imposition of her own will over that of her people is itself tyrannical, that she’s doing it for the merely expedient reason of coping with her country’s below-replacement-rate fertility, which is likely a result of an enervating social welfare system and civilizational self-doubt that the centrist and childless Merkel has not addressed, and although we’ll readily agree that moral leadership is in short supply around the world she hardly seems an exception to that rule. Nor do we expect that that such leadership will inspire many followers, in Germany or elsewhere, so her influence on events will likely be short-lived. Those who prefer political correctness and economic expedience to the survival of western civilization will applaud Merkel’s defiance of popular opinion, but they won’t prevail without an ugly fight.

with such respectable leaders as Merkel currently in power in most western countries, the widespread public opposition to their insane policies has too often found voice in the most disreputable sort of parties. The National Front is the big beneficiary in France, similarly nationalist and authoritarian parties are rising throughout Europe, and of course in America all the news is about Donald Trump’s front-running status in the Republican primary race. This makes the likes of Merkel all the more attractive to the likes of Time Magazine, but it won’t make much difference.

Trump’s “tweets” on the issue suggest he is slightly miffed he didn’t get the honor, and we’ll concede that he’s far more likely to have the greater ultimate influence on events than Merkel and all the other open-borders leaders around the world, but at least the editorial didn’t include him with such past “Persons of the Year” as Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini. We note he was at least among the finalists for the title, along with the former Bruce Jenner, the Black Lives Matter movement, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the guy who came up with the “Uber” application. Putative Leader of the Free World Barack Obama didn’t make the cut, despite his own moral leadership on behalf of western civilization’s collective suicide, and neither did any of the Republican candidates who are forcefully arguing for sensible immigration policies, so it’s going to a take a hell of a person next year to set things right.

— Bud Norman