Was it Taylor Swift's year? Or does the Middle East overshadow her joyful influence?

It’s time for the annual Time Magazine “Person of the Year.” I have five suggestions.

A nomination of Taylor Swift is not an original thought. In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Peggy Noonan lays out a compelling argument for her receiving the award. She claims that “I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right.” I also enjoy finding out if I’m right, but I am rarely in the know.

Noonan praises Swift for her enormous financial success, her bringing of “joy,” her being in a new category not be comparable to Elvis or The Beatles, her being an “epic American thing,” and her very public romance with an NFL player. Noonan’s concluding plaudit is a crescendo worthy of a successful hail-Mary pass: “[He, Travis Kelce, should] Win the Super Bowl this year, make an impossible catch, jump a man’s height to snatch the ball from the air with 10 seconds to go, score the winning touchdown, hold the ball up to your girl in the stands as the stadium roars and the confetti rains down.”

My eight-year-old granddaughter likely fully agrees with Noonan, as she knows and plays all of Swift’s songs. Recently she educated her grandfather and preempted any of my alternative selections.

My second nomination stays with the personal and the romantic, but aims at a perhaps more controversial and thinning demographic — those aspiring to sparkling love mixed well with years of commitment. As Time awarded the former head of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife, Madame Chiang, “Man and Wife of the Year” in 1937, I suggest they award the 77-year marriage of the Carters that ended recently with the death of Rosalynn. Now at age 99, President Carter once wrote, as noted in an NPR article on November 20 of this year, that before they married "I’d pay to sit behind her [at a movie theatre], blind to what was on the screen, and watch the image flicker upon her hair…" as well as that he described committing to Rosalynn as "more important than anything he did as commander in chief…” While President Carter was chosen for the award in 1976, the marriage should be the centerpiece in this award.

My third nomination is a true long shot. Virtually no one is talking about the incredible and extremely brave defense offered by a small group of volunteers at a kibbutz in Israel in the early morning of October 7. As reported in the Wall Street Journal on October 18, a small private security force successfully fought back against the invading Hamas, well before any Israeli police or soldiers appeared. The unique reason why I find the incident so important is that it illustrates the language in our Second Amendment to our Constitution, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Take that language, and think about it, in the context of that incident — both our zealous current advocates of the Second Amendment and those equally zealous advocates of gun control.

My fourth nomination is as obvious as the last one is obscure, albeit exactly to whom it might be awarded is in doubt. In the spirit of Time’s award to Adolf Hitler in 1938, for his influence on world events, Hamas and their puppet masters in Tehran might be some form of joint awardee. Another joint award variation might be controversial Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu together with the Palestinians.

My fifth nomination would break with recent tradition and nominate a non-person as “person” of the year — namely artificial intelligence. Time did name “The Computer” as the Machine of the Year in 1982.  In the language of President Lincoln at Gettysburg “…we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated can long endure….”  In our modern time we are engaged in a civil war ostensibly over pronouns and wokeness, but really over our culture and what it means to be a human. In the midst of that controversy, we are now facing a new challenge — artificial intelligence — with all of its promise and risk. Whatever pronoun we might use to address such a creature in the future, they are here now, working in our factories and serving us at restaurants. They deserve consideration for a nomination.

My prediction is that the security force in the kibbutz is way too obscure, the Carter marriage too able to be ignored, and the AI too new. It comes down to Taylor Swift and some Middle Eastern variation. While I would like it to be Swift, Time does have a separate “Entertainer of the Year” award. The Middle East is likely to win.

Contact Larry Little at larrylittle46@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Time's person of the year is Taylor Swift, or the Middle East