The editors of Time magazine recently chose "you" as the person of the year, a little piece of inanity that garnered much-deserved ridicule, including a hilarious bit on The Daily Show. But while mocking a particularly repugnant example of mass-media stupidity is certainly a noble and worthy occupation, that shouldn't distract us from a larger, more fundamental stupidity: Time's choice of a "person of the year" is totally meaningless to begin with, even if that person were real. What matters are the particular accomplishments of the individual, not some empty accolade. But that honour is just a smaller part of the compulsive ranking habit that is a regular feature in magazines from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. These lists of influential Americans or electric guitarists are not only endlessly repetitive and boring; they are also stupid and obnoxious.
Unfortunately, I find that the need to rank and choose isn't restricted to big-budget glossies or fans of High Fidelity. Whenever I introduce myself to someone as an English literature major, I am inevitably asked, "What is your favourite book?" or, "Who is your favourite author?" I despise these questions. The fact is, I have no favourite book and I have no favourite author, nor do I have a favourite band, a favourite movie or a favourite television show. Indeed, I don't think I really have a favourite anything.
Primarily, I think that this position is intuitive. It has never really occurred to me to choose a favourite book or favourite author, simply because there are so many good ones. Trying to rate the seeming infinitude of literary talent according to some scale of relative merit seems like an absurd undertaking. The same principle applies even when it comes to works under whose influence I have unquestionably fallen. Many books have influenced my life and my thinking in many different ways, and trying to evaluate the magnitude of influence with the goal of putting one of them on top seems not only difficult but useless. Rather than trying to create such meaningless hierarchies, I prefer to appreciate each work for its own particular merit, without worrying about whether it's more or less important than any other. The same goes for music, film and soft drinks.
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Justine Clarke
posted 3/21/09 @ 2:46 AM EST
That looks like lots of fun. When I was in college we didn't had so many fun activities.
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