My Acceptance Speech for Time Magazine's Person of the Year

To the editors of Time Magazine,

Thank you for naming me person of the year. It's not often that I receive such lofty praise, so I'm almost at a loss for words -- an ironic thing since you've bestowed the honor not just to me but to the other verbose bloviators in the self-important realm of the internet. Yes, bloggers, people with MySpace accounts, YouTube users, and contributors to Wikipedia truly do shape the world in much more important ways than world leaders or the captains of industry. Time Magazine said so, so it has to be true. Put that in your shoes and stand on it, Kim Jong-Il.

I mean, just think of how many lives were changed by the posting of the Angry German Kid video; how many deaths prevented from a My Chemical Romance fan's confession of a forbidden schoolgirl crush on the second-string quarterback (a fancy that balks at the tradition of the 10th grade social caste system); how many victims of AIDS and terminal illnesses cured by drunken pictures from last week's bender in Vegas; and how all of our energy problems were saved by MySpace spam messages and messages propositioning underaged girls online because that profile pic in that halter top was "teh hawt."

Ahh, but yet, you wily Time Magazine editors, you added that caveat that it is silly to romanticize the whole of the new digital media democracy; that not all voices are great and whatnot. The only problem is that by naming "you" as the person of the year, you give credence to even the most fringe, moonbat opinions in this plenum universe (landfill, actually) that is the internet. For that, those of the tinfoil hat ilk thank you.

They say that in a democracy that the participants in the democratic state get the leadership they deserve. In a digital media democracy, that also holds true. And given that our current digital media is awash with whiny 14 year olds, whiny twentysomethings who act and write like whiny 14 year olds, half-naked teenage skanks whoring for attention in front of grainy webcams and cell phone cameras, people lighting farts, people kicking each other in the crotch, curmudgeonly old men telling the youth to get off their lawns, partisan hacks of the extreme left and extreme right spewing bile at contrarians while turning a deaf ear to the idiocy of their own champions, tabloid detritus masquerading as things we should care about, and people who add interesting facts to Wikipedia articles such as "A well-known literary work with larger coprophilia passages is 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade. Such acts also play a minor role in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (pages 235-236 in the 1987 Penguin edition of the novel)..." Well... Given all that, I'd say Time Magazine couldn't find a better and more deserving bunch to lend legitimacy to.

In conclusion, thank you, Time Magazine, for stroking my vanity and the vanity of other bloggers, users of YouTube, and other people who use the internet to opine or to inform others before looking for pornography. I will be contacting your editors for a letter of recommendation in the near future.

Sincerely,
Hubert Vigilla
Time Magazine Person of the Year - 2006


addendum: I realize this is two weeks late, but c'mon, I was on vacation.