(Each Tuesday during Occupy Fringe, Jeff Questad will bring us a roundup of the latest Occupy news.)

Time Magazine’s selection of “The Protester” as its Person Of The Year was both the big story and the meaningless diversion of the week. For most of the following article it will continue to be both.

Time is News Lite, and in this Internet and 24-hour television news era their weekly cycle renders them impotent. Barely relevant as a news organization for decades, the yearly selection of their Person of the Year still manages to make news in itself. That’s one of the reasons I am disdainful of this recognition. This is the biggest thing on Time’s production calendar every year, and who could they have chosen that would have ended up being more discussed and linked to? Time chose a figure that has hundreds of thousands of manifestations in order to sell magazines and have one last shot at credibility. For one day, they were the news story and they were cool.

That’s just the first of my crazy theories about this cover.

My other thought is that this does the Occupy Wall Street movement no favors. While acknowledging it might have been difficult to portray the global citizen protestor without accessories, the masked figure, now 99% iconic, is problematic.

True enough, some protestors wear masks, and in other countries where the consequences of democratic action are more openly severe, the mask is more common. But I’ve never seen video of protests in any other country where more than a few people are masked. Most people reveal themselves. Only criminals find men in masks inspiring. Protest movements derive their power from seeing your friends and neighbors get involved and put their lives and livelihoods on the line.

It’s also possible to see the mask as something other than a negative, as a symbol of every man and woman. You can wear a mask to hide identity or to render it obsolete, to show a struggle is about everyone and no one in particular.

But I have concerns about how people see that face when it’s the only Occupier face they’ve ever stared into. If you’re like me, you know many people who support the goals of Occupy but are not involved. You know still more who should support the movement, but know little about it. Perhaps you spend time, as I do, trying to explain to Soccer Dad and Jane Real Estate Agent that the protestor is you, me, our parents, our kids, our coworkers and our neighbors. Now everybody who drops into the local grocery store for a pack of Juicy Fruit or some ChapStick sees this visage peering out them. It becomes the face of the 99% for many.

I realize not everyone thinks the masked face is unflattering, but why would Time offer anything but a backhanded compliment to Occupy protestors anyway? Time Warner is one of the 6 largest corporations in the world. After spending decades and billions to tilt laws and tax codes their way, it’s naive to think the biggest fish in the corporate world can report impartially on a movement that represents the only serious threat to status in many decades. Mega corporations didn’t spent decades buying media companies only to come out in support of a movement they see as wanting to take power from them.

I say Time chose their Person Of The Year, as they always do, to sell magazines by igniting a debate. They chose The Protestor because they couldn’t logically choose anyone else without looking even more out of touch than they are. They chose that face because a picture is worth a thousand words and this picture says something.

But many Occupiers greeted the news with cheers, grateful for the acknowledgement and attention. Some tell me I doth protest too much.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

I defer to TomDispatch for an eloquent meditation on Occupation(s) and a better attitude about the Time thing.

– — There are fewer full-time Occupy encampments now, so it’s not as easy for the media to get their head around what’s going on or to get a shot of a deadlocked bongo player. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t camps and occupations, or that they won’t be rebuilt, or that things aren’t happening outside of the parks and public spaces.

The news as we went to press last week was the port shut downs that were in progress that day. The press doesn’t understand the intention behind direct action of this sort and they shied away from coverage of what seems to have been a well-coordinated and -attended series of protests.  There seem to be very few articles offering an accounting of what happened that day.

How serious is the deer in the headlights factor when it comes to the port actions? Salon, which has covered Occupy as thoroughly and authoritatively as anyone, published a piece claiming the port shut down hurt workers and a hobbled economy more than it hurt the 1%. The next day they offered an alternative view in support of the shut downs.

– — Saturday was the 3-month mark for the movement, and in New York they had a celebration and a regrouping intending to launch a re-occupation on land owned by Trinity Church in Manhattan. The Episcopal Church, spiritually supportive of the movement, has a vacant lot where Occupiers could escape the cold and police batons for a few weeks or months, but they’re on the fence about whether to loan the space to the 99%. This is a fascinating story in itself, as protestors and religious leaders in New York are pressuring the church to support the movement with something more than lip service and sandwiches.

Attempts to take Manhattan back were met with new violence from police. When it happens over and over, the whole bad apple making mistakes theory doesn’t work. Congressman Jerry Nadler, who represents the Manhattan district where Zuccotti Park is, asks The Department of Justice to investigate systematic police violence in New York.

– — There’s a vibrant group of protestors in our nation’s capitol, and they’re staging hunger strikes to give Washington D.C. the right to vote.

New York protestors are using hunger strikes as well.  Is America ready for hunger strikes?

– — Moveon.org has a modest proposal for President Obama. Move.on doesn’t speak for the movement in the formal sense, but along with Robert Reich they are proposing reasonable and practical things the President can do to satisfy protestors. They’re good ideas, but they won’t satisfy protestors.

– — If you’re playing along at home, here are 5 ways you can Occupy Wall Street.

– — Justin Elliot takes a look at Occupy Wall Street’s finances.

– — And Welcome to the Mockupation.  When the television show Law & Order created a fake Zuccotti Park encampment for a recent episode, real protestors showed up and took it down. I’ve never seen Law & Order myself. Now the critics have spoken.

– — Finally, if you don’t know the name Mohammed Bouazizi, it’s time you you met him.

When Occupy Wall Street launched their new demonstrations on the 17th, they did so partly in the name of Mohammed Bouazizi. You can’t talk about the Arab Spring, or the worldwide protest movement without thinking about Mohammed Bouazizi. So, who was Mohammed Bouazizi?

He was a 26-year-old man in Tunisia who sold vegetables to support his mother and siblings. A year ago, police attempted to confiscate his cart as he set up for business. Some reports say he was also assaulted by an officer, struck in the street. Humiliated and desperate, Bouazizi positioned himself in front of a government building and lit himself on fire.

Reaction was fast, with video of his martyrdom going around the world in minutes. The first protests in Tunisia began that day. A month later, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali left the country. Soon protests in Egypt were underway, drawing momentum and inspiration from the sacrifice of Mohammed Bouazizi. The events we call “The Arab Spring,” in a very real sense, can be dated back to the death of Mohammed Bouazizi.

That was December 17, 2010, exactly a year before the 3-month commemoration and  day of action just passed on Saturday, a fact not lost on American protestors. Bouazizi’s name was on the lips of many at the New York D17 events Saturday.

The circumstances here are very different than they are in places like Tunisia. Here, we protest the unreasonable accumulation of wealthy at the top, the gaming of the laws to make such disparity possible, the failures of our government to equally represent everyone in the income spectrum, and all the problems that are made possible by allowing the 1% to so disproportionally call the shots in American life, from war to environmental disaster.

But the place it begins is the same. Men and women were not meant to live without agency or without possibility in their lives. Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on fire because he felt desperate, overlooked and voiceless. His extreme act gave a voice to millions of others, and a year later it echos loudly across several continents, creating a kinship that stretches from Tunisia to new York and backward and forward in time.

That’s why the angry, masked figure on the cover of Time isn’t the right face. The face they should have pictured was yours, or that of your neighbor, coworker, student, professor, or anyone else who has felt themselves looking at a life of less possibility, and who is willing to take action to earn their right to have a voice.

Mohammed Bouazizi.