Discovering Our Inner Neros

It's official. Time magazine has announced its person of the year and it's me. Or more precisely: it's meeeee! Me me me.

My first reaction was that the new leadership, job cuts and reorganization over at Time has already taken its toll and the boys and gals over there were too busy updating their resumes to really pay attention to the world around them and pick a decent winner. But a little more reflection made me realize that they were really too busy updating and maintaining their blogs and trying to upload embarrassing videos of their bosses onto YouTube to find time to pay attention to the outside world.

Or maybe they aren't as ridiculous as they seem in their choice.

I have been suspicious for a while that the real disease that is eating away at our from the inside isn't actually ubiquitous greed but that it is ubiquitous narcissism. In some ways one surely goes with the other. How else could the better half in a society of such rapidly growing disparities tolerate these disparities unless there was an innate sense of greater entitlement endowed upon the luckier few?

Still I was a little queasy that with Iraq in chaos and Baghdad in flames that Time decided to pay homage to the millions of unsung fiddlers that coalesce into a symphony of self absorption and distraction allowing our incompetent leaders to continue to destroy the human race. Still I have to admit to scouring the current edition of Time to see if they bothered to mention my blog anywhere.

They didn't.

Well, tit for tat, I am not going to mention them as I assemble a list of candidates that should have won Time's Person of the Year instead of "You".

1. Our men and women in the military. It goes without saying that they deserve our attention more than ourselves right now.

2. The Iraq Study Group. If we must give it to a group of people how about them? They found a way to move the discussion about Iraq forward.

3. Nancy Pelosi. She is the most obvious face to attach to the Democratic victory wave in congress.

4. Lou Dobbs. I can't stand the man, but he has had an impact on the debate about immigration and at least entitled his book "War On The Middle Class".

5. Barack Obama. He has given us the audacity to hope that Hilary won't be the Democrat's candidate for president in 2008.

Feel free to let me know who you think should have won.