The Real People of the Decade

DECEMBER was especially trying for me this year. Not only was it the end of the year--and an amazing year at that--but it was the end of the decade. Hence, End of the Decade specials.

Ten years of news clips and sound bites strung together in barely cohesive fashion. Cut from the 1980 U.S.A. hockey team's "miracle on ice" to a shot of Madonna's "Material Girl" video. Then Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken. Then pan to a lone Chinese demonstrator staring down an armored division. Then a crowd of drunken kids dancing below the Brandenburg Gate.

A strange juxtaposition of images, indeed.

But that's just television, right? Surely the print media can go beyond seductive images and faulty generalties. Right?

Then I saw that Time had declared Mikhail Gorbachev "Man of the Decade." Not that I ever take Time's self-important year-end blusterings very seriously. For example, last year they produced a thoughtful, well-written issue on one of the most important problems of our time, the environment, and then decided to market the issue by naming the Earth "PLANET OF THE YEAR."

Brave. As Jay Leno quipped, the other planets must be really jealous.

Yet the more I thought about this year's issue, the more it bothered me. I do not personally dislike Mr. Gorbachev. I'm not a "commie hater." What really disturbed me was managing editor Henry Muller's explanation of his magazine's "Man of the Year" declaration: "The guiding principle has been to identify the person who, for better or for worse, has had the most impact on the year's events...It is a news judgment."

As I read the article, it seemed to me that Time was focusing on the climactic events of Eastern Europe in the past year in their estimation of the Man of the Decade. True, they mentioned Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union. But the point they repeatedly drive home is that "He has been breaking up an old bloc to make way for a New Europe."

If this was the primary criterion for a "Man of the Decade" then they've got the wrong person.

SOME people make history, others just succumb to it. In the events of the past year in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev has played a passive role. He did not "break up an old bloc;" he merely let the old bloc crumble. The only active decision he made in these events of Eastern Europe was the decision not to play the role of a Deng Xiaoping or a Leonid Brezhnev.

The active decisions he did make were not in the cause of democracy. He warned the communist parties in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia not to declare their independence from Mother Russia. Given a chance to make substantive reforms in his own empire, he is loath to do so.

If Time were looking for one man who did break up the old bloc, it would have to go back to the beginning of the decade, when an electrician named Lech Walesa was trying to organize a union called Solidarity in the Gdansk shipyards.

Ten years and three Soviet premiers later, Poland has elected a noncommunist prime minister. Poland showed the rest of the Eastern European countries, as well as the rest of the world, that the chains can be broken.

Really, it would be impossible to give credit for the disintegration of the Iron Curtain to any one person. That would be akin to declaring one person responsible for the American or French Revolutions.

Rather, let's give credit where credit is due: to the people of Eastern Europe, the marchers in Prague's Wenceslas Square, the courageous protesters in Leipzig, the thousands slaughtered in Bucharest. They, along with their martyred kindred in Beijing, are the People of the Decade.