I owe this to Dave Weigel, who, as I type, is madly cackling in the chair behind me. But if you think Time‘s Bernanke POTY is egregious, I invite you to take a trip back to 1936, when the magazine hailed Emperor Haile Selassie:

If by some unhappy chance the Italo-Ethiopian war should now spread into a world conflagration, Power of Trinity I, the King of Kings, the Conquering Lion of Judah, will have a place in history as secure as Woodrow Wilson’s. If it ends in the fall of Mussolini and the collapse of Fascism, his Majesty can plume himself on one of the greatest feats ever credited to blackamoors.

Holy fucking shit! What did you just say?

Above all, Haile Selassie has created a general, warm and blind sympathy for uncivilized Ethiopia throughout civilized Christendom. in the wake of the world’s grandiose Depression, with millions of white men uncertain as to the benefits of civilization, 1935 produced a peculiar Spirit of the Year in which it was felt to be a crying shame that the Machine Age seemed about to intrude upon Africa’s last free, unscathed and simple people. They were ipso facto Noble Savages, and the noblest Ethiopian of them all naturally emerged as Man of the Year.

Sick as all of this is, I have to go back to the section where Time says that if the Italy-Ethiopia war expands into a global war, that would be good for Haile Selassie, because even if things go as badly for him as they did for poor Woodrow, at least the history books will print his name in block capital letters. That Bernanke endorsement suddenly makes a lot of sense.