Although the editors waited till Christmas weekend (a famously slow news moment, almost guaranteeing front-page coverage in the Sunday papers) to announce their fully justified selection of Albert Einstein as "Man of the Century" ... the 450-page "coffee-table" hardcover Time/CBS News book "People of the Century" (Subtitled "One Hundred Men and Women Who Shaped the Last Hundred Years") actually landed on my desk last week.
I am neither surprised nor will I raise objection to finding therein honored (is that the right term?) Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Mao Tse-Tung, or even Ho Chi Minh, who probably should have been shot for his treatment of U.S. Prisoners of War, but who (we also note for the record) had long hoped the United States would come to his rescue against French colonialism, indicating history might have taken a different turn had the Republican party nominated Robert A. Taft instead of the cynical interventionist Eisenhower, and had someone subsequently shot or otherwise discharged both the Dulles brothers.
But Che Guevara? Mikhail Gorbachev? The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini? They make this Time magazine "Top 100" list while Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot fade into obscurity? One would think Stalin's vast cemeteries alone did more to "shape the last 100 years" than the proletarian posturings of a proletarian wannabe like Che.
What is this, really? A list of people who appeared in posters on New England college dorm room walls in the 1960s and '70s? The Time-Warner editors apparently want to give us lots of Communists, but only the "nice" Communists.
Nor is it surprising -- though it is somewhat silly -- that the editors of this book, compiled on Sixth Avenue in New York, would reveal themselves so Americentric, so "popular culture" oriented as to include "The Kennedy clan," Marlon Brando, Pete Rozelle (!), Marilyn Monroe, Harvey Milk (!), Jim Henson (!), Aretha Franklin, Oprah Winfrey (!), Diana Princess of Wales (!), and Bart Simpson among -- once again -- "the one hundred men and women who shaped the last 100 years."
Not Mickey Mouse or Gertie the Dinosaur or Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck or even Mr. Peabody and his pet boy Sherman, mind you: Bart Simpson.
I know: Such lists are compiled as much to spur debate and discussion as anything else. Perhaps we should be grateful they at least omitted Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Reinhard Heydrich, Janet Reno, Lon Horiuchi, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Charles Schumer.
I'm not writing to ask why Aretha Franklin (yes, she has a great voice, as did Ima Sumac and Eartha Kitt, both of whom are missing) stands in for real American musical genii from Scott Joplin and George Gershwin through Fats Waller and Chuck Berry. (Christopher John Farley credits Ms. Franklin with "making her own ... Curtis Mayfield's pop gem 'Something He Can Feel.' " Given her status in the industry by 1976, one wonders if a "bigger" woman wouldn't instead have told the producer of the film "Sparkle": "Honey, you let Lonette and Irene sing it in the movie; why don't you release (start ital)them(end ital) on your soundtrack album?")
I was just wondering whether anyone else found anything odd about the following list:
Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Thomas Alva Edison, George Patton, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, John Moses Browning, H.L. Mencken, Louis Brandeis, Milton Friedman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert A. Taft, Douglas MacArthur, Billy Mitchell, Clarence Darrow, Edward R. Murrow, Henry Miller, Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Albert Hofmann, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, George C. Marshall, Ernest Hemingway, Igor Sikorsky, George Bernard Shaw, Werner von Braun, Erwin Rommel, Isoroku Yamamoto, T.E. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, Frank Herbert, Timothy Leary, Richard Evans Schultes, Steve Jobs, Thomas Szasz, John Lott ...
Needless to say, these people are NOT among the "One Hundred Men and Women Who shaped the Last Hundred Years," while Lucille Ball and Eleanor Roosevelt and Estee Lauder and Pele the soccer player ... are.
All in all, a slightly silly book.
The actual writing? It ranges unpredictably - seemingly accidentally - from Salman Rushdie's refreshingly meaty and thoughtful revisionist essay on Gandhi to Arthur Schlesinger's seemingly endless lube job for FDR (those who opposed him did so not because the tyrant introduced the "withholding tax" and immolated the concept of limited government in America, we are informed, but merely because the New Deal "reduced the power, status, income and self-esteem of those who profited most from the old order," though "happily" the men who "sat in their clubs denouncing him" have all now "died off. Their children and grandchildren mostly find the New Deal reforms familiar, benign, and beneficial.")
Ah, yes. Love for the gentle ministrations of the IRS, DEA, and BATF now perfumes the air like flowers in the spring.
FDR, the disciple Schlesinger informs us, "was not a perfect man. ... He could be, and often was, devious, guileful, manipulative, evasive, dissembling, underhanded, even ruthless. But he had great strengths. He relished power. ..."
Well. Thank goodness there were redeeming qualities.
The historian Schlesinger even asserts "Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements" to take over Eastern Europe, dismissing Winston Churchill's first-hand testimony that the doddering FDR scribbled down on a napkin which countries Stalin would be allowed to dominate - and that Stalin kept the napkin.
The book's puffery ranges from the hilarious analysis of Robert Reich to the merely banal insights of Kurt Loder. Reich proclaims that the "deficits are good for us" central planning nostrums of John Maynard Keynes are now fully vindicated, as though Murray Rothbard hadn't debunked the old Nazi sympathizer years ago. Loder's lunchbox essay on the Beatles, all liner notes about Ed Sullivan and the breakup, includes no useful analysis of the black American blues root music which Lennon & McCartney and Jagger & Richards (also missing) had studied so devoutly, and did such a far better job of "bringing home" to America than the crew-cut, white-suede-shoed Pat Boone crowd, which was the best the States could offer in those years while Elvis was away in the army, studying to become a self-parody.
Speaking of which ... where's Dick Clark?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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