[Mb-civic] On The "Person Of The Year" Issue

Thu Jan 6 09:41:53 PST 2005

On the 'Person of the Year' Issue

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press
 Posted on January 4, 2005, Printed on January 6, 2005
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20881/

On the Internet, a volunteer army of bloggers escalated their guerrilla war
against the mainstream media ... Nevertheless, they stay on the margins 
because, like all insurgents, they're about sniping, not governing.  Andrew
Sullivan, in Time's "Person of the Year" issue

It's amazing how useful a bad writer can be in exposing the vagaries of
mainstream thought.

Sullivan probably doesn't mean to use the word "governing" in the above
passage. He probably needs a phrase, something like "being good citizens,"
or "behaving responsibly." Sullivan is trying to compare bloggers to the
Iraqi insurgency  a wrongheaded and unfair comparison to begin with, one
that outrages both parties  but the way he writes it, he implies that the
real media's natural role is to govern. In the shaky parallel structure of
this sentence, bloggers and guerrilla insurgents make up one pair, while
mainstream media and legitimate ruling government make up the other.

We know what he means, but this is the kind of thing one doesn't usually say
out loud. Last time I checked, the press was not supposed to be part of the
ruling structure in our system of government. On the contrary  and I'm just
going by Jefferson and Madison, so I may be out of date  it's supposed to
be an antagonist to it, a check on civil power. Sullivan's sentence would
make fine rhetorical sense in Myanmar, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but
in the United States one hopes it is just bad writing.

It's a very odd thing, watching the reaction of the so-called mainstream
media to the phenomenon of blogs. The response is almost universally one of
total disdain and disgust, but the stated reasons vary.

An argument I see sometimes and occasionally even agree with is that
bloggers don't have the same factual and ethical standards that the
mainstream media supposedly has, which leads to such fiascoes as the bogus
Kerry-mistress story sweeping the country, or the name of Kobe's accuser
being made public.

But more often than not, the gripe about bloggers isn't that they're
unethical. It's that they're small. In the minds of people like Sullivan,
not being part of a big structure intrinsically degrades the amateur, makes
him a member of a separate and lower class; whereas in fact the solidarity
of any journalist should always lie with the blogger before it lies with,
say, the president. Journalists are all on the same side, or ought to be,
anyway.

Not Time magazine, though. Time lay with the president. Time big-time lay
with the president. What was great about Sullivan's "Year of the Insurgents"
column last week was how beautifully it threw the rest of the "Person of the
Year" issue into contrast. Here's Sullivan bitching about bloggers needing
to stay on the margins where they belong; meanwhile, his "respectable" media
company is joyously prancing back and forth along 190 glossy pages with
George Bush's cock wedged firmly in its mouth.

The "Person of the Year" issue has always been a symphonic tribute to the
heroic possibilities of pompous sycophancy, but the pomposity of this year's
issue bests by a factor of at least two or three the pomposity of any
previous issue. From the Rushmorean cover portrait of Bush (which over the
headline "An American Revolutionary" was such a brazen and transparent
effort to recall George Washington that it was embarrassing) to the "Why We
Fight" black-and-white portraiture of the aggrieved president sitting
somberly at the bedside of the war-wounded, this issue is positively
hysterical in its iconolatry. One even senses that this avalanche of
overwrought power worship is inspired by the very fact of George Bush's
being such an obviously unworthy receptacle for such attentions. From
beginning to end, the magazine behaves like a man who knocks himself out
making an extravagant six-course candlelit dinner for a blow-up doll, in an
effort to convince himself he's really in love.

Throughout the "Person of the Year" article  written by two of America's
great Bards of Conventional Thinking, Nancy Gibbs and John F. Dickerson 
Time strains to turn banal facts into great character insights, commonplace
quotes into Churchillian utterances. It starts right in the opening
paragraphs:

Eagles rather than doves nestle in the Oval Office Christmas tree, pinecones
the size of footballs piled around the fireplace, and the President of the
United States is pretty close to lounging in Armchair One. He's wearing a
blue pinstripe suit, and his shoes are shined bright enough to shave in. He
is loose, lively, framing a point with his hands or extending his arm with
his fingers up as though he's throwing a big idea gently across the room.

"I've had a lot going on, so I haven't been in a very reflective mood," says
the man who has just replaced half his cabinet, dispatched 12,000 more
troops into battle, arm wrestled lawmakers over an intelligence bill, held
his third economic summit and begun to lay the second-term paving stones on
which he will walk into history.

Four observations about this passage:

What kind of a maniac puts eagles in a Christmas tree? Are doves no longer
ideologically acceptable  even as Christmas ornaments?

How does one come "pretty close to lounging"? I imagine that this is a state
of being somewhere between lounging and not lounging, but what the fuck?
What would he have been if he were standing  pretty close to leaning?

When you say that shoes are "shined bright enough to shave in," we know what
you mean, but at first instant it reads like they're bright enough to wear
while shaving. Why not just say, "shined bright as mirrors"?

Are they joking when they follow up "throwing a big idea gently across the
room" with "'I haven't been in a very reflective mood'"?

Or how about this lead-in to a later section:

The living room of Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas is a place for thinking.
There are big windows for long views, a wall of books and on one side a
table that is usually freckled with jigsaw pieces.

I particularly like this passage because it's well-known that Bush doesn't
even read newspapers, let alone books. In the 2000 campaign, he carried
around a copy of a biography of Dean Acheson for six months, in an attempt
to convince reporters that he was a reader. In fact, Bush's utter lack of
intellectual curiosity is one of the most newsworthy  and most easily
proven  aspects of his character. But when you're president, and Time
magazine is profiling you, you get credit for being a bookish intellectual
just by having books on the wall.

Time manages to get through the entire profile without quoting a single Bush
critic. In fact, almost all of the people who are quoted in the piece are
Bush aides, many of them unnamed. This allows Gibbs/Dickerson to report such
factoids as Bush's private habit of admitting to mistakes, despite the fact
that he refuses to do so publicly ("Privately, he did acknowledge there had
been blunders," the magazine wrote), as well as the stirring insight that
Bush loves liberty even more than his aides do. "Every time we'd have a
speech and attempt to scale back the liberty section, he would get mad at
us," Gibbs/Dickerson quote White House spokesman Dan Bartlett saying.

But the best quote from an unnamed source was the one that compared Bush to
the icon of icons. In a section talking about Bush's admirable perseverance
(contrasted with Kerry's "slaloming") in the face of vocal criticism, this
was Time's way of addressing the fact that Bush is the most loathed
president since Nixon:

"Part of it could be his faith," says an adviser. "Being persecuted is not
always a bad thing."

And these people think bloggers need a comeuppance?