‘Time’ Person of the Year

From my one-world standpoint, the most extraordinary event since the demise of the communist bloc and the “triumph of capitalism” is the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America. Second is Brexit.

Third is the destruction of the ancient cities of Syria and the destitution and on-going suffering of the Syrian people.

Running a close fourth is the massive loss of young and promising lives in sinking shiploads of refugees and trafficked people in the Mediterranean; and the utterly unbelievable inability of Trinidad and Tobago’s Police Service to find and successfully prosecute murderers and criminals in a tiny population of 1.3 million people in a country where everything is an open secret is fifth, together with our inexorable decline into savagery and social decay. In fact, the fifth horror should be first but in the larger scheme of things it falls down the order.

Time magazine has named President-elect Trump its 90th Person of the Year. The choice is not about the most noble or greatest person but, as they put it, “the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.” Time continues, “For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is Time’s 2016 Person of the Year.” Time might have added his prominent part in “post-truth” being the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016, recognising the arbitrariness of truth in today’s politics.

It is worth noting that Adolf Hitler was Time Person of the Year in 1938, Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and Stalin was twice, in 1939 and 1942 — all of them lords of disruption. It follows that Donald Trump should also receive that crown. They all turned the world on its head, as President-elect Trump promises to do, embracing old enemies and deliberately making new ones, tearing up important existing treaties, demeaning his own security services, questioning the veracity of climate change, believing that international relations are all about business and not about diplomacy.

I had begun to write this column, focusing on Time choosing Mr Trump and the image they used of him for the cover when a friend coincidentally directed me to a Forward magazine analysis of the “subversive” nature of the image. I considered the picture’s faded lighting, Trump sitting in his large, cushioned chair and looking backward into the short distance as symbolic of regressive policies and economy meant to revive redundant, former times, but Forward went further.

They see the chair as “a gaudy symbol of wealth and status” that, when examined closely, reveals a rip in the upholstery, “signifying Trump’s own cracked image. Behind the bluster, behind the glowing displays of wealth, behind the glittering promises, we have the debt, the tastelessness, the demagoguery, the racism, the lack of government experience or knowledge… Once we notice the rip, the splotches on the wood come into focus, the cracks in Trump’s makeup, the thinness of his hair, the stain on the bottom left corner of the seat — the entire illusion of grandeur begins to collapse.

The cover is less an image of a man in power than the freeze frame of a leader, and his country, in a state of decay.”