Me Me Me Me

Time magazine, whose usefulness is declining by the second, named YOU (actually me, you pointless proles) the person of the year. And just to press the point, they put some reflective material on the cover so that you can check yourself out as you examine the cover. (Great. Yet another reason to feel inadequate in the face of Russell Crowe's cover on Vanity Fair. Couldn't those pricks from Time-Warner send along a makeup person and a lighting guy? And where's my green corn tamale and chardonnay? Don't try to slip Pinot Grigio in there instead, you fuckers, because I can fucking tell!)

It did, however, make me think of a stage rap from one of the members of Peter, Paul and Mary: (Peter, I think, and I'm paraphrasing)

In the 1920s, there was a magazine called Time, which covers a lot of ground. Imagine, all of time in one magazine. Wow! Then, in the 1930s, they came out with Life. Now life is a large part of time, but it's not all of it, just life. Then in the 1950s they came out with People, who are a smaller fraction of all of life, and an even smaller fraction of time. By the 1970s, the new magazine was Us. We won't talk about them; we'll only talk about us. Then the 1980s brought us Self. I think that by the 1990s there's only one place for magazines to go: ME. It'll be twenty pages of Reynold's Wrap.

I suppose in selecting its person of the year, Time earns credit for irony.

In the meantime, while all y'all are busy jerking yourselves off with the story that you control the world, people will keep dying in Iraq, companies will keep shipping your pension funds to Switzerland and the Caymans, and the richest 1% of the world will add another percent or two to their share of the world's wealth while you pay an increasing share of their taxes. Don't think of that, just look at the magazine--shiny pretty magazine.