Visiting Column #31 -- Accomplisher of the Year

If you're over 50, you remember when Time magazine was an interesting read in doctors' and dentists' office, a ubiquitous site on the end tables of the medical profession.  You didn't have to subscribe; your dentist did it for you, and you would read as much of it as you felt like.  Having not paid for it, you could pick and choose what articles you wanted to read.

It didn't "feel" like a politically biased publication, even if it probably was for all those years.  I don't particularly recall having that impression until fairly recently, when its extreme anti-Trump bias has taken over the magazine to the point of leading me to read, instead, things like The Medical Digest of the Carolinas, June 2008 issue rather than pick up Time.

In the good old pre-Donald days, at the end of the year, Time would do a "Man of the Year" issue.  Now, I can assure you that it has never been the position of the magazine that its MOTY was the person who had done the most good, but was, rather, the biggest "news-maker" of the year.  Adolf Hitler won it a time or two, if memory serves.  That went over well.

I recall that every year, there would be letters to the editor thereafter, telling Time what a stupid decision their choice was, mainly because the letter writer had not picked up on the notion that the winner was not necessarily winning it for what they regarded as doing good things.  Half of news, as we know, is bad.

So these days, with bias infesting the editorial rooms at Time, the Man of the Year award has been pretty much a pfffft exercise each year.  After all, who really cares what a bunch of hard lefties in New York think?  I certainly don't, and I sort of doubt you do either.

And so we have this year's "winner", who is that snarling little Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, the barely-a-teenager kid who has been running around the world on someone else's nickel, yelling at the USA because we're not doing enough to stop global warming.  Now, I have not heard that she has set foot in China, to be fair to the USA, which is weird given that China and India are the Earth's lead polluters, while the USA has drastically and successfully gone after our own emission levels.

I mean, I understand why she hasn't gone after China.  Let's face it, a country that masses its armies outside the city of Hong Kong, lest they try to exercise the independence granted to it, well, I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't take kindly to a pre-teen girl telling them how to run their country.

On top of that, since the brunt of her rhetoric is aimed at the USA, you have to know that the funding behind her cavorting about the globe is from the Soroses and Steyers of the world, and those types are big fans of totalitarian communist regimes like China, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.  So don't expect to see little Greta leading a march through Beijing.  The tanks are bigger than she is.  And so is her bankroll.

And that's kind of the point.  While it is a blip on the radar in terms of impact when a little girl growls around the world, petulantly taking us to task for living our lives, Time apparently feels that she has actually accomplished something, enough to put her on the cover as MOTY.

But what, exactly, has she accomplished?  All the Paris Accord signees (which the USA thankfully no longer is) look at her and nod and cheer, except they already signed the agreements, such as it is, so they are saying proudly that they're "already on their way" and that she doesn't need to yell at them.  So nothing is happening there.

The USA is doing what it can, successfully, not because of her but in spite of her, since the laws we operate under now were already in place when she was barfing strained peas in Stockholm.

And that's kind of the point of the title of this piece.

Perhaps Time ought to take a look at its criterion for the MOTY award, which is the person who, good or bad, was the biggest news-maker for the year.  Well, shoot, if they really mean that, there are two categories -- Donald Trump and everyone else.  Whatever you think of him, he gives new meaning to the word "news-maker."  So the magazine could just retire the award and start a new one, at least as long as he is president and dominating the news.

I do think there is a better way, though, at least if Time survives another year of dental offices as a print medium.  Instead of trying to determine who made the most news other than President Trump, why don't they change the MOTY standard to biggest "accomplisher" of the year, and award it to the person who had the most impact, either by invading another country, or curing metaformic blastotechnic sofanoma in potatoes, or whatever.  But something at least tangible, at a minimum.

Liberals simply don't know when they are being laughed at, since they are pretty much isolated in their echo chambers in New York and California.  But Time's MOTY choice is being laughed at all over the rest of the country, because they gave an award, not that anyone really cares about it now, to someone who essentially accomplished nothing at all.  Kind of a Jerry Seinfeld MOTY.

Certainly they ought to consider strongly what their criteria are, and that perhaps a basic tenet ought to be concrete accomplishment of, well, something.  Perhaps they have been so Twitterversed into thinking that being an "influencer" is a big thing, so much that they can't see the forest for the trees.  Perhaps they actually think someone cares any longer what they think, because no one cares what Greta Thunberg thinks.

Or it doesn't matter, because Time can't survive forever with idiocy like that.

My dentist might miss it, but I think the rest of us won't.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton