Don’t Let It Go to Your Head

By now, dear reader, you have heard the news: Time magazine, the slightly déclassé version of Newsweek (or is that the other way around?) has named you as its “person of the year.” Of course, by “you,” the editors at Time don’t mean, say, Peter Ridgley of Newark, NJ. Rather, they mean “you” in the sort of paternalistic “everyman” sense that appeals to journalistic elites.

So, break out Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man: It’s time to salute yourselves for nabbing this prestigious award. Gosh: And your mother never thought you’d amount to much. How wrong she proved to be.

Take that, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: You may be the nutball leader of the Iranian failed state, but you ain’t got anything on us. Or, to be more specific, you ain’t got nothing on you. Deny the Holocaust all you want; you still aren’t Time’s person of the year.

Before we continue to cast aspersions against Time’s insipid choice for “person of the year,” however, we should admit one little thing: We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” don’t read Time. To be honest, we don’t even gander at it obliquely.

This may sound odd, but there’s a medical rationale behind our studied ignorance: For some reason, exposure to Time magazine causes us to break out in a rather nasty rash. In this respect, it’s kind of like Paris Hilton.

Perhaps this isn’t so strange: How else do you expect folks to react to a lowbrow journal that employs that self-obsessed nose-picker called Wonkette? If you ask us, if Ana Marie Cox doesn’t make you break out into hives, you’re probably deceased. Or married to her, which is far, far worse.

Actually, we think that Time magazine should be renamed to Crappy Pseudo-News Veering Dangerously Close to People Magazine—With the Exception of Robert Hughes, Who Can Actually Write. Not, we dare say, a particularly snappy title, but it has the distinct benefit of being true.

But we digress from our topic for today: Time’s cloying choice of “you” for its quasi-esteemed “person of the year.” (Or, as the feminists call it, “persyn of the year.”) Not since Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable male-female sign have we encountered such a dumb choice.

In fact, the idiocy of “you” as “person of the year” almost makes us hunger for an appallingly obtuse and predictable left-wing pick. You know, like Yasir “She’s My Baby” Arafat. Sure, good ole’ Yassir is dead. And he was a disgraceful terrorist. But at least he is an actual choice. Didn’t anyone at Time think Stanley “Tookie” Williams was a nice selection?

Is it just us, or does it seem like the folks at Time simply gave up at their annual “person of the year” meeting? To us, the staff at Time is really ‘phoning it in. We can picture the meeting now:

Secretary: “So, boss, who do you choose for our ‘person of the year’?”
Boss: “How about you. Now let’s go golfing.”