How many Georges does it take?

"Let George do it."

I'm not sure of the origins of that saying, but it apparently applies to the 20th century, according to specials on cable TV about the leading personalities of the past 100 years.

Among the people being cited as "Legends, Icons and Superstars of the 20th Century" are George Washington Carver, George Gershwin, George Bernard Shaw, George Balanchine and George Herman "Babe" Ruth. A ten-part, monthly series of one-hour specials about them and their peers began this month on CBS Cable.

I'm surprised George Clooney didn't make the cut, given that the finalists were chosen by what a CBS press release grandly calls "a prestigious panel of journalists." It included editors from People magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Selectors were also from Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and other magazines.

The idea behind the project was for the panel to select "50 intriguing, influential, powerful and entertaining people of the past 100 years."

Odd selections

Strangely, there is no list of "Five World War I Leaders," perhaps because the editors were in too much of a hurry to select "Five Who Fascinated Us:" John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Diana, Castro, John Wayne, and Marilyn Monroe.

Einstein, who could count, might have pointed out that that's six people on a list of five. But he's among the "Five Giants of Science," a list that also has a half-dozen entries: Einstein, Carver, the Wright Brothers, Fleming and Freud.

But stuffing six people into a fivesome pales in comparison to the "Five Music Icons," who are actually eight people: Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and the Beatles (one-quarter of whom is a George).

Few women

Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King and Gandhi are the only overtly religious people in the catalogue. Pope John Paul II, Pope John XXIII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Maximilian Kolbe, Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the El Salvador martyrs and even Rasputin, who died in 1916, are missing. But I recognize that it's difficult to think of them when your head is filled with images of Jacko.

Options

I would also try to be a little more global. The CBS list is top-heavy with Anglo-Americans. How can anyone tabulate music icons of this century and not include Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Toscanini and maybe even Debussy? Who could count up "Five Movie Superstars"; write down Chaplin, Disney, Hepburn, Spielberg and Nicholson; and not throw out one or two of them in order to fit in Fellini, Bergman, Truffault or Kurosawa?

Finally, the "Five Television Originals" seems to have been given no thought whatsoever: Ball, Winfrey, Edward R. Murrow, Philo Farnsworth (the putative inventor of TV) and Jacques Cousteau. Oprah is hardly original; she owes her existence to Phil Donahue and he to Steve Allen. Cousteau belongs in some other category entirely ("Five Who Snorkeled," perhaps). If the roll-call is meant to include true TV originals, I would keep Lucy and Ed but add Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen and Norman Lear.

And if we're going to go George-happy, where's Gorgeous George, the wrestler and progenitor of the current governor-elect of Minnesota (whose real middle name is George)? Now there was a TV original!

(11-26-98) [[In-content Ad]]