Time magazine has named me -- I mean, you -- I mean, everybody! -- its Person Of The Year! Far be it from me to dismiss that as the callow audience-pandering of an entity too marketing-savvy to name Osama bin Laden the person who most affected events in 2001. I mean, my technophobic reservations, notwithstanding, any choice that gets Luce's old middlebrow warhorse tweaking the "Great Man" theory has something to recommend it. But I defy anyone to ingest in unironic triumphalism this representative puree of web 2.0 pabulum: "[w]e made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs [presumably this means good guys in flight suits and not bad guys in dynamite vests, but the great thing about the web is that you get to have it your own way. -jz] and built open-source software." Hey, we all wanna change the world. When it's on the cover of Time, it's a pretty sure sign it's left the bleeding edge, on the bullet train to bromide. Meanwhile, out in the desert of the real ... Okay, that's actually from the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador 25 years ago, a barbaric age before iPods and Google maps which just happens to be our template for Iraq. I mean, we've had overt advocacy for torture and arbitrary imprisonment here in this Year of You. It's been widely blogged-about, to be sure. But Jose Padilla hasn't left a comment.