Joel Marcus
Since the weekly "Time" invented the "person of the year" gimmick in the middle of the last century, every year both the good and the bad have appeared on its covers. Since his chosen motto was "everyone who influenced the world for better or worse", both Hitler and Stalin and other dictators of various kinds appeared on its cover pages, alongside inventors and intellectuals who coded our lives. But the choice of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as Man of the Year seems strange or forced. Although the man surpassed himself in the way he took command of the bleeding city, the Man of the Year should undoubtedly have been the one who delivered the blow to America that not only claimed thousands of victims, but also crushed its pride. According to the rumor, the readers of the weekly did not want to see bin Laden as the man of the year, and the weekly gave in to the pressure and chose a local hero. In a philosophic paragraph in the cover story, the weekly is right: Bin Laden's monstrous actions "do not elevate him to the rank of the historical monsters."
It is not clear what the entrance fees are, how many people have to be killed, or what other monstrous acts had to be done to join that exclusive club of "historical monsters". What is clear is that Bin Laden ushered in, or is part of, a new era in which individual people, without nations behind them, without large and sophisticated armies, without arsenals of nuclear weapons, threaten civilization and turn mighty powers into powerless ones.
Every time you see the pictures on TV again from that bitter and hurried day it is hard to absorb the genius of the simplicity of the action. 19 young people, some of whom learned to fly in the USA, went to their deaths with peace of mind and with the help of precise planning, taking thousands of people with them. This action shook the self-confidence of the great powers, disrupted war doctrines, damaged the economy, tourism and civil air routes and changed the lifestyles of tens of millions of people. The "butterfly effect" theory, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause an earthquake in Guatemala, is being realized in practice. Without a doubt, as I write these lines, someone somewhere in the world is planning the next blows. Statue of Liberty maybe? Simultaneous explosion of several planes in the air? A chemical or biological attack at Disneyland?
About 30 million computer owners have been affected for the fourth month by an attack of letters carrying the "Sirkam" virus. The person responsible for it is a single man operating alone from Brazil, whose virus is multiplying by itself as he continues to sip caipirinia. More than once the Pentagon computers were hacked and the e-mail in the White House was blocked. To this day, the man driving the government centers crazy with the anthrax letters has not been revealed. And how long will it take until someone succeeds, for example, in disrupting the air traffic control systems at the airports while thousands of planes are in the air? The next terrorists will perhaps come from among the opponents of globalization. And who knows? Maybe somewhere sits the man planning an attack on the scale of New York in Israel, in order to ignite an all-out war in the region? No technology, no advanced satellite could have photographed the mind of a man like Richard Reid, who intended to blow up an American plane with substances that could be bought at a pharmacy and that were hidden in the heels of his shoes.
Today begins a year in which individual people may change or at least disrupt world orders. At any given moment there is someone in the world who sits and thinks how to screw up the system. The more developed technology a country has, the more vulnerable it is to individuals with idea-fixes, ideological fanatics or lunatics. Bin Laden's capture or elimination will not change the phenomenon and the degree of danger. maybe the other way around. In the days when every psychic is a king, when civilization is the goal and there is still no answer for it - the person of the year is the lone unknown danger preparing the next show attack.
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