Return of the living dead



With the sudden departure of The New Republic's Andrew Sullivan and the increasing intellectual conformity of Tina Brown's New Yorker, the moribund East Coast media elite has finally triumphed over the sassy British invasion


BY CAMILLE PAGLIA






When Andrew Sullivan announced his resignation from the editorship of The
New Republic at a staff meeting on April 12, the Washington and national
press corps immediately went hunting for the buried bodies.  "Did he quit, or
was he fired?" asked Time magazine.  That Sullivan simultaneously
disclosed his HIV-positive status somewhat muddied the waters, to the
vexation of his principal opposition within the magazine, who complained that
Sullivan was diverting attention from his alleged editorial and managerial
failures.  On "The Charlie Rose Show" on April 19, Sullivan refused to
respond to these charges and insisted on looking forward to his new projects,
notably a book on friendship recently contracted to Knopf.


[The New Republic]



   The press has thus far completely missed the real story in this unhappy
saga.  Sullivan was part of a phalanx of strong British personalities who,
thanks to a cultural vacuum here that has yet to be seriously explored,
captured key positions in the American media in the early 1990s.  Sullivan's
appointment to head The New Republic in 1991 drew coast-to-coast
publicity because he was merely 28 and also openly gay.  In 1992, when she
became editor of Harper's Bazaar, Elizabeth Tilberis completed a British
sweep of the premier American fashion magazines, which had begun with Anna
Wintour's assumption of the top post at Vogue.
 
  But the real shock to American sensibilities was the appointment in
1992 of Vanity Fair's Tina Brown as editor of The New Yorker -- that
venerable war horse of the well-heeled white bourgeoisie, a magazine that for
me and many other 1960s students was the ultimate symbol of the pretentious,
superficial, and moribund literary establishment.  Brown's revival of the
wit, style, and sophistication of Vanity Fair's 1930s glory days is one
of the great success stories in modern publishing.  Her tilt toward the
entertainment industry and the international celebrity demimonde, as well as
her wicked taste for flamboyant photography, enraptured admirers of Vanity
Fair (like me) but horrified many longtime supporters of The New
Yorker, who generated a firestorm of protest before she had even moved into
her new office.


[The New Yorker]



 This was a pivotal moment in American cultural history.  Had Tina Brown
gone into The New Yorker with the same boldness and unerring instinct
with which she had recreated Vanity Fair, she would have revolutionized
everything -- most of all that poisoned nexus of smug, old-guard, genteel
liberalism that radiates among the cliquish professional class from Manhattan
to Cambridge and Washington and that has been the ruination of my own
Democratic Party.

 But far from cleaning house at The New Yorker, Brown, perhaps gun-shy
from the burgeoning hostility, left its embedded petty tyrants in place and
was soon regularly publishing their cronies.  Astonishingly, The New
Yorker, with the rare exceptional piece, has become the most politically
correct major magazine in the country.  In feminism alone it endlessly
recycles retrograde ideas dating from the late 1970s and early '80s.  And its
complicity with the Ivy League professoriat has become a predictable tic.

 Andrew Sullivan's departure from The New Republic forces
recognition of the failure of the British invasion to transform the
incestuous, corrupt East Coast media establishment, a tangled network of
school connections, intermarriages, covert trust funds and compulsory schmoozing.  Despite her
recent lurch toward Roseanne, Tina Brown has become a prisoner of her social
milieu, and her fatigue with the weekly grind is shown by The New
Yorker's increasing reliance on single-topic double issues.  Whatever
Sullivan's problems at The New Republic -- his absence, for example, on a
national tour last fall for his first book,  "Virtually Normal" -- his
risk-taking innovations and substantive achievements over 250 issues of the
magazine are indisputable, confirmed by a rise in subscriptions and a 76 percent 
increase in advertising revenue.

 Sullivan's path to the editorship began in his graduate study at Harvard,
where he met the magazine's Cambridge-based owner, Martin Peretz.  What is
frequently called Sullivan's conservatism is in fact his impatience with the
outmoded categories of liberal and conservative.  He is a serious
intellectual with a restless, voracious, philosophical mind.  Ever since he
invited me to write for The New Republic early in his tenure (a choice
that cost him constant backbiting inside the magazine), I've been keenly aware of
Sullivan's intuitive grasp of the rapid evolution of contemporary thought, as
well as his prescient sense of editorial drama and timing.

 In the media speculation over Sullivan's resignation, it has
been repeatedly suggested that the aboriginal inner circle of The New
Republic resented his turning the magazine's focus away from politics and
toward general cultural issues like sexuality and the arts.  But Sullivan was
correctly responding to an unstoppable historical momentum.  In the age of
talk radio, CNN, C-SPAN, and the global Internet, the print magazines will
never regain their former political clout.  What wore Sullivan out over the
long haul and finally rearranged his priorities was the provincialism and hypocrisy
of a cozy, back-scratching media elite, slow-moving and slow-thinking
dinosaurs whose assumptions he challenged and whose stale air he thankfully
no longer has to breathe.





Camille Paglia is Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" and "Vamps & Tramps."