You? It Should’ve Been Me
"In the harsh climate of the 24/7 media, in which gossip and controversy are so much more newsworthy than real news, people forget."
-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
TIME Magazine’s annual Person of the Year issue hit newsstands recently and readers were intrigued to discover that they’d each been named. At first blush, this felt akin to the competitions entered into by children – “you’re all winners today, there are no losers” a grown-up would happily, breathlessly declare so as to spare the kids from the traumatic experience of losing out in the grade school talent show. And then, there was the inevitable feeling that we’d been cheated. What had I done to warrant the honor of being on the cover of this illustrious newsmagazine? Of course it’s often argued that the Person of the Year is not so much an honor or recognition for good deeds as it is an acknowledgement of the individual (or group) who have influenced the world the most in the previous year – for better or for worse.
Taken in that spirit, the people named were extremely appropriate – a self-indulgent year deserved a self-indulgent “winner”. 2006 was the year YouTube became the biggest phenomenon since MySpace launched when it was sold for $1.65 billion and MySpace did pretty well in its own right. Both did so by getting users to do all the actual work in the site development – all the company itself did was provide a platform. And work they did, as users logged on by the millions to either see or be seen on such sites and “pore over the minutiae” of the daily lives of average people.
Frank Rich believes that this is that is indication of America’s desire to escape from the dismal reality facing us. Certainly that reality is not a pleasant one: a war with no end in sight and no palatable solution under discussion, an economy that seems to be running on fumes as people work harder and longer for fewer dollars and cars that are as well, thanks to the ever-escalating price of gasoline, pausing for brief respites via downward dips around election time before continuing its upward crawl. The outlook is similarly bleak when considering America’s lag on the education front and the ongoing struggle to unearth some way of providing affordable healthcare to all Americans. Add to this list natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina worsened by both the present administration’s ineffectual response to the event itself as well as its inability to acknowledge the reality of global warming and it’s no wonder that everyone would prefer to take the ostrich approach.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of a woman – Linda – who spent several years in the “real” world of the Reservation, away from the artificial life she had led. Once reintroduced to the man-made society of England, she spent much of her time in a soma coma, unable to bear anything but the pleasant daydreams induced by the drug. While Mr. Rich is correct in stating that many people are seeking some form of escapism from the dreariness of their lives, there is a second element here: that our society is basically self-involved. Between web sites that allowed people to broadcast themselves and reality TV shows, entertainment in 2006 centered around anything that allowed people to feel as though they were getting their fifteen minutes of fame, or infamy, as the case may be. There was no distinction between celebrity and notoriety, just as long as there was some exposure. Of course the irony was that no one was really in the limelight; just blending into the vast tapestry that is the present-day entertainment industry. And thus a new phenomenon was born: anonymous fame.
Many of the characters in Brave New World exhibited these very qualities. Their primary concern was always for themselves, and not for self-preservation or intellectual enlightenment but purely for amusement. They spent as much time as possible rushing from one task to another, from one game, dance, weekend trip to another; rushing to anything that would provide them with a little more pleasure or at least, what they were conditioned to believe was pleasure. They all perceived themselves to be the center of the universe, cared not for others or for anything that was happening in the world outside of the two-foot radius from where they were standing.
Like Huxley, Ray Bradbury painted a similarly disturbing picture of the future in Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s characters race around in their cars in a world of minimum speed limits and live in houses where the televisions bleed into every corner, every thought, at all times. Books are forbidden, lest the populous pause to think, to question their bland, meaningless existence. In both novels, the masses are kept in check, thoroughly occupied with empty busy work; all the while the society’s leaders do what they feel is best for themselves. We’re not being force-fed soma and televisions aren’t mandatory yet, but is TMZ much better?
More recently, Green Day’s album American Idiot focused on the same themes. At the time of the album’s release, said frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, “Bush is a former Ritalin kid who happens to be one of the most powerful men in the world right now.” He goes on to say, “We’re a pacified country, a Prozac nation. People are putting band-aids on the problems and that’s supposed to be okay. They’re government-issue tranquilizers—just get everyone to agree and keep them drugged as well, and then feed ‘em bullshit.” Armstrong’s views and Green Day’s album perfectly encapsulate the state of affairs in the country—the self-obsessed narcissistic way of life and the semi-conscious state most Americans are living in explain why the war in Iraq doesn’t occupy the same place in our minds and in the media that Vietnam did and why it to took this long for the voters to realize just how inept the federal government’s executive branch has been.
While there are of course some who are concerned about the “greater good” there are many more whose main priorities are self-gratification. It’s tempting to say that the media only provides the masses with unintelligent fodder and that if we were given more substantive material, we’d all throw ourselves with equal zeal into that. But we were given the opportunity to be less superficial – following 9/11 everyone examined the lives they were leading and vowed to concentrate on what was really important – yet we’ve fallen back into the same routine. The egocentric, 24/7 entertainment-focused lives we lead have come to symbolize the year.
This of course is not an indictment on fun. Life, after all, is meant for living and enjoying oneself. But when serious issues such as war and global poverty, not to mention a climate crisis, loom large, perhaps it would be wise to tone down the celebration of excess symbolized by the Paris Hiltons and Britney Spearses of the world and emulated by countless others on YouTube and MySpace.
So yes, Time magazine got the subject right for their cover. They just got the title wrong. It wasn’t you who was big in ’06 – it was ME.
(1) Combat Rock, Guitar Legends No. 81