Since I take so much pleasure in irony, there was at least one level in which, after having yesterday read Huffington Post blogger Russell Shaw write about the inevitability of Al Gore being this year's selection for Time magazine's Person of the Year, I could enjoy the Associated Press report that the selection was actually Vladimir Putin. What made the report interesting, of course, was not the selection but the reasoning behind the selection:
The nod went to the Russian leader because of Putin's "extraordinary feat of leadership in taking a country that was in chaos and bringing it stability," said Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor.
This one criterion overlooks many dimensions of Putin, which even Stengel could not ignore:
"He's the new czar of Russia and he's dangerous in the sense that he doesn't care about civil liberties, he doesn't care about free speech," Stengel said.
In other words, as Tom Lehrer put it about Werner von Braun, Putin is "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience;" and expedience has worked very well in his favor.
So did Time speak for the rest of us? Did it ever? And, even if did, just what was it saying? Perhaps Gore was rejected for precisely the reasons that Shaw found him so inevitable. He has dedicated both his heart and his mind to getting out the word that the planet is in trouble and enjoining as many people in the world as he can to unite in reversing a dire trend. Putin, on the other hand, is perceived as the fixer. Gore warned about a chaos that is descending upon the entire world. Putin took the chaos that had engulfed Russia and returned stability "by any means necessary." I take this to mean that, at least at Time, solving problems is more important than understanding them, even if it means overlooking some of the less savory steps that lead to the solution.
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