Time Magazine, dog lovers, Glenn Beck, and the dangers of Pokemon

Way back in 1933, Time magazine put a portrait of Adolf Hitler on its front cover, featuring the Führer in a relaxed pose with a faithful looking hound in the background.

It almost goes without saying that Hitler was a dog lover, as well as a vegetarian and wouldn't hurt a fly. During most of the war his companion was a female German Shepherd dog, Blondi, given to him by Martin Bormann. The dog was allowed to sleep in his bedroom, a privilege not shared by Eva Braun (anyway, she liked two Scottish terriers, so enough about her).

During his time in World War 1, Hitler adopted a stray white bull terrier (Fucshi) and later had two German shepherds - the first, Prinz, he had to lodge elsewhere during his years of poverty, but it escaped and returned to its master, showing how wonderfully loyal dogs can be (while being utterly clueless about humans).

Hitler also had German Shepherds going by the names Mucki, and Blonda (and if you want to read more about Hitler and his hounds, and the concerned way in which they were put down in the bunker during the final days, go here).

Now of course I'm not suggesting that dog lovers were the reason the second world war started. That would be an unconscionable breach of Godwin's Law.

It's simply coincidence that Miranda the Devine has announced that today is dog lovers' day, so we must pay attention to hound lovers wherever we find them.

After all, we all know that video games, or at least screen culture was likely the cause of the recent GFC, by encouraging recklessness and risk-taking in the young, and it's likely the same explanation will shortly solve the riddle of the great depression and the start of the two world wars. I'm still researching evidence that Hitler was a hard core gamer (close to reaching the final level of Doom with a maximum score) and the reality that he was a devoted war gamer provides more than an inkling of the truth. Read what Hitler Youth got up to:

Activities for boys included games of hide and seek called 'Trapper and Indian,' and war games in which the boys formed platoons, put on red or blue armbands, then were supposed to hunt down the enemy and rip off the other color arm bands. This often resulted in fistfights and outright brawls between platoons. Younger, weaker boys got pummeled while platoon leaders stood by or even encouraged the fighting. Ripped shirts, along with scrapes and bruises were common during these field exercises, which were intended to toughen them up.

Now put that in a video game and it's QED! (here) I hope shortly to announce startling evidence that as well as rockets and such like, the Nazis were hard at work on computers designed to play early incarnations of Galaxian.

Anyway, putting deep theories aside, as sadly we must put Miranda the Devine to one side, soon enough Time magazine was correcting its initial error by making Hitler man of the year with a slightly different tone to the cover.

And indeed if you want to take a look at the vagaries of the coverage of history, you can do no better than search the covers of Time (perhaps by starting here with the first cover featuring Hitler, though you might find this feature slow loading).

Now comes the news that Glenn Beck has scored his very own cover and a feature story. Which as the saying goes, puts him in excellent company.

You can find the story here, under the header Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?, if you can be bothered, because it's such a Reader's Digest lite kind of puff piece that it really raises the question of whether Time magazine is bad for America.

Naturally it's got lots of people agitated - here's David Heiwert reminding himself and Time why he never bothered to renew his subscription. (Dear Time Magazine: About that subscription renewal).

I've had the benefit of both Time and Newsweek through freebies, and marvel that people can take them as useful reading (as if Reader's Digest is a good guide to books, with any complexity or big words cut down to size so that the thought bubbles are as tasty as the sugar and flour in a sponge cake).

The glory days for these kinds of magazines are now over as the interweb has cut them down to size. Chalk up one to the interweb. It's refreshing for example, to trot off to Jeff Winkler and Radley Balko's The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of the Past 40 Years.

My personal choice of their timely selection? At least in the context of seeing Glenn Beck on the cover, and the soft core treatment he's given within?

Yep, if you follow the link you get plenty of hand wringing and anxiety about filth, and its impact on civilized discourse in America, with a feeble bit of Salvadore Dali designed to whip up a nightmare sense of a world gone awry.

You'll find a bit more of the same mealy mouthed piety when it comes to Glenn Beck, but it's on the level of a 'print the controversy' routine - of a kind you might publish without wishing to offend creationists while hinting that just maybe there's a grain of truth in the theory of evolution.

In the end Time is the kind of magazine which doesn't mind too much who's doing what to whom, provided they produce good copy and a nice cover, and if that's not enough, they can always use their status to whip up a little hysteria, whether occultism, the porno plague, the population plague, drugs, crack, cyberporn, and most comically the addictive dangers of Pokemon (remember Pokemon? Did it produce the dementia that resulted in the GFC? Who knows? Only Susan Greenfield perhaps).

Anyhow, enough already about Time, and its feeble, lame wristed copy, designed as snap crackle and pop. If I want that, I'll eat a breakfast cereal.

How about a little taste of Glenn Beck then, with a refreshing sorbet to follow, though sadly I could only find a copy of the sorbet where the lip synch is a little wobbly.

Young people! No technical standards at all! Try explaining to them that an mp3 file is lossy compared to an aif file, then trying to explain to them why Beck is a demented clown!