Man of the Century: The Campaign

By Joel Stein

When I first realized I wasn't being invited to the meetings to choose TIME's Person of the Century, I thought it was because I was just a rookie, a goofy celebrity interviewer whose opinion didn't mean much on weighty matters. But after about three seconds of that, I thought better: it's because they're considering picking me.

I'm not deceiving myself. I know I'm a long shot. The way I see it, I have about nine months to do something big, something splashy, to pull the votes my way. Something besides plastering the office walls with handmade posters that say STEIN IS FINE, JOEL'S A GEM and THE OTHER GUY CAN'T READ! Those were a major part of my last successful campaign (vice president of my high school class), but there apparently is some office rule about signs and Fun-Tak that I didn't know about.

I figured I'll play on my strengths, like watching MTV all day and making penis jokes. But I know from painful personal experience that the voting editors don't appreciate that stuff.

So I'm going to have to be reborn, not really like a phoenix but more like a troubled NBC sitcom that gets picked up by UPN. Only even better. These are going to have to be my strongest nine months since gestation.

I'm going to be less like me and more like previous People of the Century, guys like Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and Napoleon. I started to research these giants of history until I found out they didn't have websites and gave up. But I basically suspect I need to take over a large piece of the world, give the people something useful like libraries or fruit smoothies, and get myself a cool name. I like Joel. I also like Joel, but I'm not sure I'll ever find that button on my keyboard again. I plan to amass my forces in Australia and then spread out into Asia and down into Africa, because that once worked for me in Risk.

Despite numerous phone calls and the admittedly unconvincing promise of "cool, reasonably priced uniforms," none of my friends want to join my army. But who needs an army, anyway? If I do it alone--no allies, no armies, no diplomacy, just me, mano a mano, Rambo-style--they'll have to give me the nod over the other world leaders of the century.

But the more I think about the world-conquering bit, the more it sounds hard. Far easier just to run a bunch of negative ads about the competition. And unlike them, I have the distinct advantage of not only being in the same building as the voting members but also being alive. I mean, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill didn't exactly have physiques befitting Men of the Century. How much could Churchill, even at his prime, bench press? Probably not as much as me. I'm just saying.

If for some reason none of this works, I plan on appealing to my editors' hunger for publicity. These are the people who picked Bart Simpson as one of their 20 Entertainers of the Century and Lucky Luciano as one of the business geniuses. Compare that buzz to what they'd get for picking me as Person of the Century. How many new people would want to read TIME once they heard that the Person of the Century was working on the very issue they were reading every week? I know for sure my dad would finally break down and buy a subscription.