If we take "obliterate" literally, it means to cause to disappear.

The media seem to be overeager to undercut Trump's accomplishment by saying that he said the word "obliteration" but there's actually — possibly — something left. 

From this morning's news: "Trump reveals Israel sent agents to Iran’s bombed nuclear sites to confirm their 'total obliteration.'"

He seems determined not to abandon his word of choice, "obliteration."

How literally do we take "obliteration"? Really hardcore literalism would require that the thing be wiped from human memory. "Ob-" means against and "littera" means letter. Strike out the text. It's what Orwell's "memory hole" did. 

So how have we been using the word "obliterate" in recent years? Here's what I've noticed in the past 2 decades, just 11 examples taken from this blog's archive.

1. Quoting Hillary Clinton: "If [Obama] does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?"

2. Quoting Camille Paglia: "Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media...."

3. Quoting Trump: "As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)."

"Elon's not shy" and the Japanese Prime Minister is not "trying to suck up."

The event was a meeting between President Trump and the Prime Minister of Japan, Shigeru Ishiba, but a reporter saw fit to exploit the occasion to provoke Trump about Musk: "Do you have a reaction into the new Time Magazine cover that has Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk?":

Trump says a simple "no" in a way that sounded to me like it meant what a stupid question. 

Then, after the translator conveys the question and short answer to the Japanese Prime Minister, Trump deadpans, "Is Time Magazine still in business? I didn't even know."

The translation ensues, and Trump gets to start again. Reponse #1 was the "no," response #2 was the joke, and response #3, was to praise Musk: "Elon is doing a great job. He's finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste. You see it with the USAID, but you're going to see it even more so with other agencies and other parts of government. He's got a staff that's fantastic... [USAID is] a fraud... very little being put to good use. Every single line that I look at in terms of events and transactions is either corrupt or ridiculous, and we're going to be doing that throughout government and I think we're going to be very close to balancing budgets for the first time in many years...."

There's a follow-up question: "Will you put Elon Musk on the podium for us to ask him some questions?"

Trump: "Oh, sure. He's not shy. Elon's not shy."

As for Shigeru Ishiba... earlier he had appealed to Trump's ego.

Time didn't have much choice: Trump is the "Person of the Year."

Here.

It's a very long article. Excerpt:

Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace.... He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom.... An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.....

Trump has a ready explanation for his improbable resurrection. He even has a name for its climactic final act. “I called it 72 Days of Fury,” he says as the interview gets under way. “We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.”... While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged....

Whether Trump can actually fix the root causes of Americans’ anger is another question....

To many Americans, his defiance in the aftermath of the shooting—rising bloodied, fist in the air, chanting “Fight!”—made him an inspirational figure for the first time. “A lot of people changed with that moment,” Trump tells TIME, sipping Diet Coke from a glass at Mar-a-Lago....

Much much more at the link. 

"Why Did Trump Say Kamala Looks Like Melania on This Time Cover?"

Asks Margaret Hartmann in New York Magazine.

Trump complains that the media is giving Harris a “free ride.” The evidence he cites is that she looks too good on the cover of Time magazine.... But the Time cover is a pretty accurate representation of Harris.... [I]t might be a freehand “drawing,” as Trump put it, [but] the photo credit says, “Photo-illustration by Neil Jamieson....”... 

Next, Trump claims Harris looks like Melania on the cover.... But aside from the fact that they are both human women in their 50s, Harris and Trump’s features aren’t very similar....

Trump complimented Harris, saying, “She’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?”...

The short article doesn't answer the question in its title. Hartmann wraps up by calling Trump "weird." Why not offer the easiest explanation? Trump loves beautiful women, and he expresses that love openly, even when talking about his political opponent. 

"We believe in the democratization of content."

Said Time CEO Jessica Sibley, quoted in "Time to remove digital paywall" (Axios).

Time's Person of the Year was easy to predict — especially since Elon Musk was last year's Person of the Year.

Volodymyr Zelensky.

Who should be TIME's "Person of the Year"?

 I saw this poll — at "Nominees for Time’s Person of the Year: Politicians, celebrities, essential workers" (KIRO7) — and I thought the answer was obvious and clicked...

If you look back on recent winners, however, you'll see that the "Ebola fighters" — a broad array of health care workers — won in 2014. So that might tip the scale to Fauci. Celebrate an individual. 

It's funny how little Joe Biden gets in that survey, but at least he got more than Kamala Harris. It would be ridiculous to give it to Kamala Harris, in my view. And surely the opportunity will arise next year, after Biden steps down and she becomes the first woman President. 

My favorite picture from Time's cover story on Pete Buttigieg is not the cover....

... though that's very nice. It's this family snapshot of Buttigieg (c. 2000) playing on a Nintendo machine with his father:



I cannot express how much I love this picture. The dog's tail, lit up in the foreground, is such a nice, homey touch, obviously accidental, since the dog isn't posing and the photographer's poor sense of framing is attested to by the sheep "standing" on young Buttigieg's head. I like how young he looks back then, the man Time calls the "gay Episcopalian veteran." And I love seeing his father — his "late father Joseph Buttigieg" — playing so earnestly, with no thought — I suspect — that this scene would ever be gazed upon by the readers of a Time Magazine cover story. And what was in the tin — the kind of tin that almost surely originally housed a fruitcake? Hard boiled eggs? Snowball cookies? What's in the chest atop the dresser? Jewels? Silverware? An embalmed pet?  And what's in the trunk upon which the gay Episcopalian future veteran sits? Is that a guitar in the corner? A dobro? Mysteries of the Buttigieg childhood home. Beautiful!

Person of the Year.

The article at TIME: "THE GUARDIANS AND THE WAR ON TRUTH." They couldn't just honor Khashoggi. I haven't combed through the article, but Trump's name is in there a lot, and I don't think he counts as one of the "guardians."

ADDED: I must add that I got there via the great Scott Adams tweet: "Fake News is Time's Person of the Year."

"The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she taken from the scene. The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together."

Time Magazine adds a correction to its cover story "‘All I Wanted to Do Was Pick Her Up.’ How a Photographer at the U.S.-Mexico Border Made an Image America Could Not Ignore/'This one was tough for me. As soon as it was over, they were put into a van. I had to stop and take deep breaths,' Getty photographer John Moore said."

Time doesn't seem that distraught about its separation from the truth, but I'm assuming that's because it sees its story as fake but accurate.

"The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature said on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of not naming a laureate this year..."

"... not because of a shortage of deserving writers, but because of the infighting and public outrage that have engulfed the group over a sexual abuse scandal," the NYT reports.

I think they should do something creative, like when Time magazine chose all of us its Person of the Year:



Make all of us writing on the internet the Nobel Laureate this time. Everybody's a winner. Or just all of us women.

But, no. Instead the panel is going to name 2 winners next year! So the experience of being THE Nobel Prize winner will be diluted for 2 writers who are both, presumably, worthy of celebration individually in a year of their own.

What a piss-poor solution to their PR problem! Let's see who they decide to honor next year. I bet they use the occasion to throw a couple awards to writers in countries that are usually ignored. There are 7 countries that have won 6 or more Nobel Literature prizes and more than 150 that haven't won any. Let's see what happens. Mark my finely clear-sightedly realistic, evocatively ambiguous, impassioned, magnificent, luminous, frolicsome words. You know, I am upholding the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history with extraordinary linguistic zeal revelatory of the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.

Why is Taylor Swift on Time's "Silence Breakers" Person of the Year Cover? And why is Rose McGowan not?

Quite a few people are asking this question, e.g., Vox:

Swift does have grounds to appear on the cover: She was at the center of a sexual assault trial this summer that in retrospect seems like a precursor to our current post-Weinstein moment.... In 2013, Taylor Swift was groped by radio DJ David Mueller, who grabbed her butt during a meet-and-greet photo session. Swift told Mueller’s boss, who fired him following an investigation. Mueller then filed a defamation suit against Swift, saying that he never touched her and that she ruined his reputation and cost him his job. So Swift filed a countersuit, claiming assault. She sought — and won — an award of just $1, saying through her lawyer that she wanted to “serve as an example to other women who may resist publicly reliving similar outrageous and humiliating acts."...

Swift’s appearance also raises the specter of those not included on the Time cover who were arguably more central to the #MeToo moment. Rose McGowan, who led the charge against Harvey Weinstein and his associates, is relegated to the interior....

It might have something to do with who was willing to sit for the portrait Time wanted for the cover. Maybe McGowan didn't want to be in that group or didn't like the words Time wanted to use or the strange aesthetics of the cover — with the women all draped in black and looking grim.

Notice that the names of the women do not appear on the cover, and I'm sure that caused many people (including me) to say I know that one's Taylor Swift but who are these other women?

I can see why Time was eager to include the very famous Taylor Swift on the cover. Swift was in the running for Person of the Year in her own right as an individual, and she did very well on Time's poll to find out who readers wanted to see.

I can think of all kinds of things that may have caused McGowan to decline to participate. Maybe she's just angry that the silence-breaking has taken so long. Why didn't Time Magazine apply its journalistic resources to breaking the silence itself long ago? Now that others have done the work, Time wants to reap rewards from doing its traditional end-of-the-year cover. I can see resisting that.

But let's see what Rose McGowan herself may be saying. Ah!

Ronan Farrow. Investigator of the Year. Writer of the Year. #MyTime

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) December 7, 2017

She thought Ronan Farrow deserved it. That's something many of you were saying in the comments to yesterday's post about the Person of the Year:

I'm glad to see that Time magazine took my advice and made the women who spoke out the "person of the year."

I started talking about who should be Time's "person of the year" on November 19th, when I made the joke, "Let me be the first to say, Time Magazine's 2017 Man of the Year should be the little man — the penis."

After publishing that, I noticed that Time was doing a poll, and: "Vying for the top position — each with only 7% — are Carmen Yulín Cruz, Taylor Swift, and (the nonperson who I think will actually win) #MeToo."

But I had a problem with #MeToo as the winner:

I'm okay with #MeToo getting the honor, even though I'd like to see something more precisely focused on all the women (and men) who spoke out about sexual abuse. The fact that there's a hashtag mixes up the bigger story with the existence of social media. (If you want to give the honor to social media, give it to Twitter.) And #MeToo has some problems with it, chiefly #MeToo what? Not everyone who uses the tag really belongs in the category that ought to be defined as the problem. There's a real danger that the category will be diluted to the point where people will stop caring about victims of abuse and start worrying about the moral panic and the urge to delete flawed human beings from the midst of the supposedly good people.

Now, I see that Time — despite its use of #MeToo in the poll — reframed the idea as I'd suggested, focusing on all the women (and men) who spoke out about sexual abuse. In fact, Time got even more precisely focused and highlighted the women who spoke first and broke the silence:

Time's article explains its move away from #MeToo as the best way to encapsulate the sprawling story:

Like the "problem that has no name," the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is borne of a very real and potent sense of unrest. Yet it doesn't have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.

One more thing, and I don't think this is in Time's article. You've got the problem of women who were not heard from for so many years. If the idea is that they are finally getting heard, it seems really contradictory to put the hashtag (an abstraction) on the cover rather than real human individuals. Don't hide them. And the Time brand is "Person of the Year." Time has deviated from using an actual human being a couple times — "the computer" in 1982 and "The Endangered Earth" in 1988.

But it would be bad in a special way to go abstract this year, when the story is about women finally getting seen in the press after so many decades — so many millennia — of invisibility.

"Okay, I am just going to right out and say that Time's Man of the Year should have been me."

Lewis Wetzel wrote in the comments to yesterday's post "It can't be that Time colludes with prospective Persons of the Year to see what access it can get out of the process of honoring somebody." Wetzel offers these "bullet points":

-changed the oil -- myself -- on the 2001 Explorer.
-learned how to make a darn good Alfredo sauce.
-read both "Iliad" and "Odyssey."
-hired a guy to do some yard work I've been putting off.
Have you done better? Your immediate response will be to say "Yes!", but then look at the bullet points again, especially the one where I changed the oil in the 2001 Explorer. By myself.

Also in the comments Leslie Graves wrote: "Who would be on the cover of Time this year if the Koch acquisition had already taken place?"

Meade answers that question: "Someone born November 27, 1953 in Norfolk, VA maybe?"

Google tells me Meade is talking about Steve Bannon. That brings up 2 points:

1. Why would the Kochs want to highlight Bannon? The Kochs don't like Bannon publicly, but Bannon was instrumental in getting Trump elected and he's gone now. The Kochs haven't publicly liked Trump either, but as Bannon famously said: “If Pence were to become President for any reason, the government would be run by the Koch brothers—period. He’s been their tool for years... I’m concerned he’d be a President that the Kochs would own" (quoted in "The Danger of President Pence" in The New Yorker).

2. In yesterday's post, I expressed suspicion that Time did have the idea of making Trump Person of the year again this year, but only as a co-winner, and pairing him with someone in a negative way, which is what Time did to Bill Clinton in 1998 (making him co-Person with Kenneth Starr). Now, I'm seeing that the co-winner could very easily have been Steve Bannon.

It can't be that Time colludes with prospective Persons of the Year to see what access it can get out of the process of honoring somebody.

Apparently, Trump needed some action last night and this must have seemed like a good gambit.

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

Of course, Time defends its reputation.

The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.

— TIME (@TIME) November 25, 2017

Time doesn't say exactly what it does in the choosing process, only that in some way the President is "incorrect." It doesn't say he's completely wrong.  But Time is getting us to notice the annual nonsense of Person of the Year, and Trump wins too because he's making (some of) us think of course he deserves it (probably), but Time won't give it to him unless the Art-of-the-Deal man makes some deal with them. I'm picturing the editors rubbing their hands together and saying "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing. I'm not gonna do it."

But who really gives a damn how the process they make us look at every year actually works? It's better to leverage the occasion. Go big, go arty, go comical, go hardcore. Like Rose McGowan:

.@realDonaldTrump I found your photo shoot for @TIME pic.twitter.com/BaAYQHpdki

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) November 25, 2017

Don't like that? Then go big, arty, comical, and hardcore in the direction in a pro-Trump direction (or some other direction that suits your taste). If you like Trump, don't be boring. Be creative and viral. We're all diseased.

ADDED: If Time is right and the President is incorrect, does that make Michael Moore a liar?

Film-maker Michael Moore claims that director Mel Gibson cost him the opportunity to be Person of the Year alongside Gibson in 2004. Moore's controversial political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 became the highest-grossing documentary of all time the same year Gibson's The Passion of the Christ became a box-office success and also caused significant controversy. Moore said in an interview "I got a call right after the '04 election from an editor from Time Magazine. He said,' Time Magazine has picked you and Mel Gibson to be Time's Person of the Year to put on the cover, Right and Left, Mel and Mike. The only thing you have to do is pose for a picture with each other. And do an interview together.' I said 'OK.' They call Mel up, he agrees. They set the date and time in LA. I'm to fly there. He's flying from Australia. Something happens when he gets home... Next thing, Mel calls up and says, 'I'm not doing it. I've thought it over and it is not the right thing to do.' So they put Bush on the cover."

ALSO: Would Time ever give the honor to the same person 2 years in a row? While a good number of men have been Man of the Year more than once, the only person who won 2 years in a row was Richard Nixon, and in the second year, he was a co-winner with Henry Kissinger. I think Trump — if indeed he was in serious consideration for the honor — was at serious risk of being paired with someone else. While Nixon getting paired with his National Security Adviser was not disrespectful to Nixon, if you look at the last time a President got paired with someone else, it was Bill Clinton, in 1998, paired with his nemesis, Ken Starr. So I think if Trump was under consideration, it was in some way where he wasn't the sole honoree, but put alongside #MeToo or The Women Who Spoke Out or Rose McGowan and Ronan Farrow or something that Trump wouldn't want anyway.

"I was wrong – Althouse obviously had her finger on the pulse of America when she started posting about Wankgate 24/7."

"I was wrong – Althouse obviously had her finger on the pulse of America when she started posting about Wankgate 24/7. It really has become the defining sociocultural (and political) event of 2017," writes Paco Wové in last night's Worn-Out Laugh Café.

Let me be the first to say, Time Magazine's 2017 Man of the Year should be the little man — the penis.

ADDED: I see that Time is currently running a poll on the subject. Current results here. Vying for the top position — each with only 7% — are Carmen Yulín Cruz, Taylor Swift, and (the nonperson who I think will actually win) #MeToo.

What about Trump? He gets 6%. Wasn't he Man of the Year last year? You can't just give it to the President every year. You might think a Trump antagonist would win, but the main 2 they've put on the list — James Comey and Robert Mueller — are lagging at 2% and 4%.

I'm okay with #MeToo getting the honor, even though I'd like to see something more precisely focused on all the women (and men) who spoke out about sexual abuse. The fact that there's a hashtag mixes up the bigger story with the existence of social media. (If you want to give the honor to social media, give it to Twitter.) And #MeToo has some problems with it, chiefly #MeToo what? Not everyone who uses the tag really belongs in the category that ought to be defined as the problem. There's a real danger that the category will be diluted to the point where people will stop caring about victims of abuse and start worrying about the moral panic and the urge to delete flawed human beings from the midst of the supposedly good people.

"He can't sing, or he can’t really play. Picasso spent 40 years trying to get as simple as that."

Said John Lennon about David Peel, quoted in the Rolling Stone obituary for David Peel, a New York City street character who lived to be 71:

The singer, born David Rosario, first came to notoriety in the late Sixties when he and his band the Lower East Side – named after the New York City region where they routinely performed on the streets – scored an offbeat hit with "I Like Marijuana," off the group's 1968 debut Have a Marijuana....

Peel and the Lower East Side's first studio album, 1970's The American Revolution, also boasted pro-pot tracks like "Legalize Marijuana" and "I Want to Get High," but also examined more social issues of the era, including his anti-Vietnam War stance ("I Want to Kill You," "Hey, Mr. Draft Board") and a song about "bad cops" ("Oink, Oink").

John Lennon sang about David Peel in a song called "New York City":

"Up come a man with a guitar in his hand / Singing, 'Have a marijuana if you can' / His name was David Peel / And we found he was real/He sang, 'The Pope smokes dope every day' / Up come a policeman, shoved us to the street / Singing, 'Power to the People today.'"

Listen to the John Lennon song here. Here's the audio of David Peel singing "I Like Marijuana." It's not good and I don't think it was ever intended to be good, just kind of fun and stupid, which expresses the essence of marijuana, no? Here's a clip of Peel singing "Marijuana," which I'm linking to only because something horrible becomes visible at 0:58. Here's Peel explaining himself and showing off a hippie style of speaking in 1979. Before clicking, just stop and think how you would answer the question "Who are you?" in the style of a hippie:

"I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody OK?"

TIME's interview with Trump is hilarious, right down to his last line, quoted above.

I'm just going to say: Hello, everybody!

"What amazes a lot of people is that I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody’s ever seen. And yet I represent the workers of the world."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in TIME's "2016 Person of the Year Donald Trump."

This is not the article linked in the earlier post, about the process of picking Trump for Person of the Year. This is the article about him. It's written in a fancy style (by Michael Scherer) with sentences like — referring to Trump's apartment — "It’s gilded and gaudy, a dreamscape of faded tapestry, antique clocks and fresco-style ceiling murals of gym-rat Greek gods."

And if you can wade through enough heavy prose, you'll find the dark side of journalism:

By seeking to condemn the dark side of politics, Clinton’s campaign may have accidently [sic] validated it. By believing in the myth that Obama’s election represented a permanent shift for the nation, they proved it was ephemeral. In the end, Trump reveled in these denunciations, which helped him market to his core supporters his determination to smash the existing elite. After the election, Trump’s campaign CEO Stephen Bannon—the former head of a website known for stirring racial animus and provoking liberal outrage—explained it simply. “Darkness is good,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.

This is the method of a demagogue. The more the elites denounced his transgressions, the more his growing movement felt validated....

In the space between those 2 paragraphs is a black-and-dark-gray photo of Steve Bannon, brooding. Keep scrolling for similar dark pictures of Kellyanne Conway and (unrecognizable) Reince Priebus.

There was just no way to weasel out of it.

TIME picked Donald Trump as Person of the Year.

This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year. So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer....

Points for resisting mentioning Hitler as a former Man of the Year as you remind us that it's not necessarily positive.

It’s hard to measure the scale of his disruption. This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur—never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own—now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously. Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse....

Again with the "for better or worse."

Smoking ruin.... how about the smoking ruin of mainstream media?