No Time For Fools

Ever since 1927, Time magazine has chosen someone as a Man or Person of each year. By the founders' definition, the title goes to the individual who influenced the news the most in a given year. By that criterion, I'm not sure if Vladimir Putin actually earned Man of the Year for 2007. He was talked about frequently, and unfavorably, but this looks to me like an excuse to do a long-planned story on Russia. Time has done this before; there was one year in the 1980s when they named Deng Xiaoping for no particular reason (he had already been the Man of 1978, if I recall) except to do a big survey of China. If Time had to have a controversial foreign leader this year, they could have gone with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. My own preference would have been to share the title out between Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for the way they've discredited the Democratic party in record time. But Putin is a better choice than the readers' choice, which was J. K. Rowling.

The readers' preference for someone like Rowling made the reaction to the Putin announcement inevitable. Time had to see it coming. They've gotten grief every time they've named an unpopular foreigner, whether Hitler in 1938, Khrushchev in 1957, or Khomeini in 1979. For some reason people hear the term "Man of the Year" and assume it's meant to be, or ought to be, an honorific, an award that should go to some exemplary person like Rowling or Al Gore. So right on schedule, Time is being denounced on news sites all over the English-speaking world as if the editors were giving aid and comfort to the "dictator" Putin. No matter how many times Time explains its criteria, people choose to ignore them in favor of throwing a moral tantrum.

Actually, the magazine should get a little credit for growing a pair. Too often in recent years Time used its year-end cover to honor abstract concepts or generic categories, reaching a reductio ad absurdam last year when "You" were Person of the Year. I always suspected that these were also excuses to run long-simmering surveys, but they probably also reflected a risk-averse mentality among the editors, who may have feared mass subscription cancellations if they made an unpopular choice. This time, Putin is indisputably a controversial choice. His interview inside the issue will make it more so, since he comes off as a thin-skinned creep with an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the U.S. and a chip on his shoulder to match. We'll all have to deal with it, since he plans to hang around power even after his term ends, and he'll have to deal with the fact that Americans are just bound not to like the kind of politician, maybe even the kind of person Putin is. But let's give him a break for the holiday season and direct our disapproval at all the simpletons who refuse to distinguish between news analysis and knee-jerk moral judgments and would replace the one with the other everywhere if they had the chance. They'd probably find themselves more at home in Russia than they'd suspect.