Time magazine has generated laughter around the country by ostensibly naming everyone Person of the Year, bringing to life the cheesy vanity mirror which makes the person looking into it the Time Person of the Year. But the reality is what Time meant to do was not honor anyone or everyone, but to try and make the point that the idea of single persons of the year is becoming overrun by People Power.
In many ways, it is a lament of the end of the Wise Old Men era -- the power of the elite to exclusively shape discourse and ideas in our country has been sharply curtailed. Of course, Time is a mediocre publication at best, run by a group of mediocre people - the type that used to run our discourse. That era, THEIR ERA, Time now proclaims, is over.
More.
Time has a sidebar titled Power to the People that is the real point of its choice. The series of 15 profiles of persons who shaped the discourse despite their lack of connections or platform is the point of Time's selection. Anyone can drive the national discussion, in large and small ways.
Atrios makes the point that in the past, Time would have chosen someone emblematic of the argument Time is making:
Usually with these types of things they choose someone or something which is somehow representative of the underlying phenomenon, like when Jeff Bezos was their pick. Along those lines "the youtube guys" or maybe, as Salon chose, S.R. Sidarth, would've been appropriate.
Keeping with my "it should have gone to the dirty fucking hippie" position, the fundamental political shift in 2006 was on the Iraq war so it could've, say, gone to Murtha or maybe people who got it right to begin with (ha ha, just kidding).
Atrios' point here is that normally Time would have taken some prominent anti-war activist who used the new medium to drive their point of view. Time chose not to do that this year. Perhaps that was too controversial in the Time headquarters. Perhaps no one came to mind. But it is Time, and just plain incompetence can never be ruled out there.
So, while we can all write Mom and say We Won!, the truth is Time just proved yet again its inability to actually report or tell a story - by the way, a story worth telling.