Making A God Out Of The Person Of The Year

We live in a world where, although history is created by the popular masses, it becomes symbolized by individuals: individuals in whose eyes the light of accomplishment is beacon-bright and whose faces bear all the signs of the iron determination that wells from their innermost depths. It is but a natural quality that has been hardwired into the constitution of man to not only endure, but to prevail as well. Nothing in his life could be stranger and stronger than the insatiable craving for whatever it is that will preserve inviolate a system of which he is the centre. That insatiable craving is what is known in Nietzschean philosophy as "the will to power" and it is the fundamental drive motivating all things in the universe. The will to power, which Nietzsche refers to elsewhere as "the instinct for freedom," is the harbinger of a Brutus crisis, which is a deliberate attempt to maintain independence of the soul and autonomy from and dominance over all other wills. It is sometimes given vent to in the rape, pillage, and torture of primitive barbarians, or it can be refined into a cruelty turned against oneself, struggling to make oneself deeper, stronger, and with an independent mind. Famous warlords, mighty kings, heroic popular leaders, captains of industries and those in the van of technological progress, religious leaders; in a word, demigods, who contain within them an interior light, do not need to lay siege to the collective psyche of the popular masses in order to express their will to power: they only need to sneeze and the rest of us will catch cold, for we will always stand in awe of that strange electromagnetic force which they radiate and which forces us to step aside.

There used to live a man in a distant land and in a different milieu who was quite averse to simple rules of personal hygiene. But through the instrumentality of hero-worship, he was revered as a god by a coterie of teeming acolytes and named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. His socio-political programmes as manifested in the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, both of which were acts of social surgery, left the Chinese landscape desolate and the inhabitants depauperated. Even after death, Mao Zedong still remains one of the most controversial figures in modern world history.

Joseph Stalin, a sanguinary despot of no mean order, was voted Time's Person of the Year in 1939 and 1942. This was the same person over whose ability to function as a level-headed apparatchik hung a large question mark. And it is on record that the man who christened him "Stalin," Lenin, his immediate predecessor in office, regarded him as a bete noir because he was coarse, petulant, impolite and stubborn. But inspite of these negative character traits, his overcharged will saw him assuming the power position of the general secretary of the communist party. He was personally congratulated on his 60th birthday by no other person than Hitler, and in 1939 the romance between these two megalomaniacs blossomed into a non-aggression pact signed between their two countries. It comes as no great surprise to us that Stalin was recently voted the third best Russian in a poll organized by a TV station , despite being responsible for unquantifiable crimes against humanity.

Next in the roll call of dishonour is Adolf Hitler whose every dishonourable action has made the most rational and less than rational of all creatures to cringe with shame. He was voted Time's Person of the Year in 1938, the same year he annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and literally became the Chancellor of Eastern Europe. He tormented and threatened all the neighbouring countries with the relish of a sadist. His politics of irredentism and anti-semitism launched the whole world into a war of attrition and near extinction of the Jews and other less privileged minorities. Even though the world woke up one day in 1945 to learn about the death of this outsized focus of evil, he bequeathed a legacy of xenophobia to the neo-nazi movements that are sprouting everywhere in the world.

The officiating priests at the Person of the Year ritual, Time's Magazine, have been unequivocal in stating the objectives of this hoopla and the yardsticks they employ in determining who gets consecrated. In their own words, "persons who most affected the news and lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year" normally emerges the winner. Little wonder then that our sensibilities are sometimes subjected to jolts of electro-moral shocks with known villains being given the appellation of Person of the Year. To make up for this lethal shock to our sensibilities, we are at other times regaled and compensated with personalities whose service to humanity speaks volumes. These are people who have distinguished themselves by the position and meaning they give to man, by the value they put on human dignity and human conscience. These are people who while sharing Rousseau's sentiment that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," have gone a step further to do everything humanly possible to loosen those chains. Lech Walesa, Time's Person of the Year in 1981 was the first person to lead an insurrection against the Kremlin empire; Mikhail Gorbachev, Person of the Year in 1987 and 1989, was what you will refer to as a maverick. As a human catalyst, he changed the Russian socio-political landscape through Glasnost and Perestroika; David Ho, Person of the Year in 1996, researched and pioneered treatment for AIDS; Pope John Paul, Person of the Year, 1994, peregrinated the whole world while spreading the gospel of love. And the list goes on ad infinitum.

There is no gainsaying the fact that anybody stood in doubt of who will be crowned Person of the Year in 2008. When the meditations of the heart of David's fool are accepted in the sight of God, then the probability of nothing being impossible becomes ever greater. A sceptic becomes a fool when this is the rule. And the writer of this piece, a highly sceptical homo sapiens has been proven to be a fool, for he had always held in greatest doubt the possibility of a black taking over the reins of the Vatican and the Whitehouse. Two things happened to define the crowning moments of 2008. A black man won the American presidential election; and secondly, the race for the Vatican by a black man has been put on hold for good with the retirement of Nigerian Cardinal Arinze. Barack Obama, the skinny guy with a funny name has broken and surmounted all barriers to become the first black president of God's own country. And it was no mean achievement for such a person to ride the waves of propagated antipathy and the persistent campaign of calumny with such dignity as we all saw. And even though the whole world is now expecting him to give commands to mountains and thereby set them in motion, we should not lose sight of the fact that he is human and not yet a god.

In the distant past, when a god did not exist, it became necessary to invent one. And the world flourished with a multiplicity of gods and goddesses, and men would sometimes beat their idols, like the Chinese did when their prayers were unanswered. The heroes in our contemporary society are of the same calibre as those that were deified in antiquity, and if Time Magazine had existed in antiquity, there would have been no doubt that Egyptians pharaohs, Chinese emperors and Roman emperors would have continued to be named Persons of the Year, year in, year out. And yet, these men were all deified, from Julius Caesar to Alexander the Great. While giving a reason for this trend, Joseph Campbell, a foremost authority on ancient mythology, advanced the view that apotheosis is the expansion of consciousness that the hero experiences after defeating his foe. And the defeated foe is more often than not, the task he has set for himself which affects our lives, for good or for ill and is embodied in what is important in the twilit year. And as observed by David Hume, a card-carrying materialist, when men are overwhelmed by veneration or gratitude for any hero or public benefactor, there is a natural inclination to convert him into a god.

Will it not amount to begging the question if at this juncture, we proceed to ask the obvious? When are we going to make gods and goddesses out of our Persons of the Year, from whistleblowers, aviators and researchers through despots, terrorists and murderers, to philanthropists and religious fakirs? The trajectories of frenzied souls awaken us to the madness of every culture in offering to serve as the official megaphone for polytheism. The murderously warlike, the deceitfully entrepreneurial, the libidinously hedonistic, the shamelessly bacchanalian and the notoriously vindictive are initially heroified; after which they are simultaneously canonized, and then collectively deified.