Sad old men struggle with Time’s Greta choice
TIME magazine, like most other weekly and monthly publications, has seen its influence dwindle in recent years. There was a time, if you pardon the pun, when Time magazine was a genuine agenda setter in American and global current affairs, and was a go-to magazine for comprehensive analysis of the news of the day.
Former US president Richard Nixon, for example, holds the record for being the most frequently featured individual on Time’s front page, appearing 55 times between 1952 and 1994, the bulk of those coming when the Vietnam War and Watergate scandals were raging.
Sadly, the magazine is a shadow of its former self, a once great magazine struggling to remain relevant in the age of instant digital information. (In 2016 in a rather unfortunate error, the magazine included the male author Evelyn Waugh on its ‘100 Most Read Female Writers in College Classes’ list, which raised justifiable concerns about the level of basic education among the magazine’s staff ).
However, thanks to its yearly ‘Person of the Year’ cover, which has appeared each December since 1927 (Charles Lindbergh, in case you were wondering), the publication is guaranteed to generate at least one annual talking point.
Over the years, we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly feature as Person of the Year, as well as the abstract. In 1950, ‘The American fighting man’ representing US troops in the Korean War, was the first time a living person was not selected. In 1982 it was the computer that got the nod, in 1988 it was the endangered earth.
Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939), Queen Elizabeth II (1952) Martin Luther King Jr (1963), Mikhail Gorbachev (1987, 1989), Pope John Paul II (1994) and Barack Obama (2008) were among the more famous names to be selected, but the magazine has never been afraid to select lesser known individuals if their influence was deemed worthy enough (David Ho, a pioneering scientist in AIDS research, was the 1996 choice).
Which brings us to this year’s choice. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg becomes the youngest person to feature on the showpiece cover, and if ever there was no-brainer, this is it.
Greta’s meteoric rise to global fame and influence has been extraordinary. In a little more than a year, Greta has gone from conducting a solitary protest outside her country’s parliament in Sweden to leading a worldwide youth movement. Here we have a child with Asperger’s who has become the voice of a generation, a girl who had the courage to stand in front of world leaders at the UN general asembly and shout ‘how dare you’, a girl who led a staggering 7 million climate strikers across the world in September’s protests.
‘For sounding the alarm about humanity’s predatory relationship with the only home we have, for bringing to a fragmented world a voice that transcends backgrounds and borders, for showing us all what it might look like when a new generation leads, Greta Thunberg is Time’s 2019 Person of the Year,’ explained Edward Felsenthal, the magazine’s editor in chief.
Bizarelly, Greta Thunberg continues to be a polarising figure, with the bulk of her dissenters being sad, angry middle aged and old men who somehow feel threatened by her very existence.
Whether it is her age, her gender, her message or a combination of all three that irks so many of these sad, angry old men remains to be seen.
One of the world’s leading sad and angry old men - Donald Trump - has been struggling with Time’s choice this week, particularly as it was revealed by the magazine that he was one of four runners-up for the coveted spot, along with Nancy Pelosi, the Hong Kong protestors and the whistleblower in the Trump/ Ukraine scandal.
You can only imagine Trump’s inner fury at being runner-up to a 16-year-old girl pedalling fake news about made-up climate change, as he sees it.
‘Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!’ he said on Twitter shortly after Time’s announcement. If ever there was a definition of sad and angry, this was it.