Congratulations, everyone

I am Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006, and I have to say it's about time. I'm thrilled to know the letters I've been sending finally got through to someone.
To be fair, Time Magazine has apparently chosen to name every man, woman and child in American -- or maybe the world -- its Person of the Year this year.
The reasoning behind Time's decision, it seems, is that the Internet's power to bring people together and give everyone his or her own voice gave unprecedented power to the individual. The popularization of blogs gave everyone the potential to be a terrible journalist, and sites like YouTube meant we had a central location where we could see all those stupid movie clips we once had to wait for our friends to e-mail us. And honestly, who can get enough pictures of rapping grannies and monkeys smelling their own rear ends? Take that, America's Funniest Videos.
If you ask me, the whole thing sounds like a big cop-out. The Time editors probably just forgot they were supposed to choose someone and made up some junk about learning America's true nature by watching the videos they choose to post online. I know what that's like. Once, in college, I put off writing a paper because the bar on campus was showing Ferris Beuller's Day Off. These things happen. But if watching a minute and 15 seconds of some dude hand-farting the Star Spangled Banner really reveals the character of this country I'm going to think seriously about moving to Canada. First we've got photographers camped out hoping to get pictures of Britney Spears without her underpants and now this? It's almost too much to take.
But let's take a minute to consider Time's point of view. Clearly, many people have made a notable contribution online. Sites like Wikipedia have tapped the communal knowledge of geeks everywhere to build a kind of living encyclopedia, and bloggers have in some cases helped keep mainstream journalists honest. Blogs have also allowed real journalists -- you know, hard-working folks like me who make their livings writing jokes about Britney Spears' underpants -- to keep our fingers on the pulse of America without leaving our desks. Talk to people to find out how they feel about an issue? The heck with that, I'm going to go to blogspot .com and pull quotes from a bunch of anonymous people who seem to think the world cares what they think about when they're sitting in front of their computers in their jammies. I'm in favor of that, although it would help if I could find a few more blogs where people expressed opinions about Rosemount.
But think about this: If Time is naming everyone Person of the Year, we have to take the good with the bad. We have to take Britney, for example. And we have to concede that her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, is also worthy of being considered Person of the Year, even though all he did was get someone pregnant, marry her and release a terrible, terrible rap CD. We also have to welcome to the club people like the guy who earlier this year called police to report his quarter-pound of marijuana had been stolen, then showed up at the police station to identify his drugs. Or the countless teens who used MySpace , another one of those wonderful community-building online tools Time is so excited about, to post details of the crimes they had either committed or planned to commit. Then there's my favorite local Person of the Year, the guy who, pulled over by police, claimed to have a bunch of cocaine in his truck's spare tire, only to claim it was a joke when police didn't find anything. We even have to accept the hand-farting guy, who has apparently done an entire hand-farting series, including performances of the Jeopardy theme and Happy Birthday.
I'm not sure this is a road we're really willing to go down. I'm not confident we as a nation are ready to come together as a collective Person of the Year when we can't even get together long enough to agree it's OK to wish people a Merry Christmas.
I don't care, though. I'm still putting it on my resume. At least until People finally gets around to naming me Sexiest Man Alive.