In the late 80s I used to make occasional trips out to Los
Angeles to visit friends who were part of a loosely organized Hollywood left.
This included fairly successful writers like Michael Elias who grew up about 5
miles from me and wrote "Young Doctors in Love", a memorable parody
of hospital melodramas. It also included Jay Levin, the founder and editor of
Los Angeles Weekly, a newspaper that combined radical politics and glitzy
Hollywood lifestyle material. Like all such "underground" publications
that were styled after urban weeklies that sprouted in the 1960s, it walked a
tightrope between commercialism and idealism. After Levin sold the paper to
well-heeled investors, it fell off the tightrope and now offers a fairly
conventional political analysis--albeit packaged in a kind of
self-contratulatory "hipness" that reminds one of the New York Press.
The New York Press never tires of lambasting the Nation Magazine for its
out-of-date liberalism, but offers instead an "edgy", hard-line
conservatism straight out of the Dartmouth Review. This amounts to bashing Al
Sharpton and the Democratic Party on a weekly basis.
In the latest LA Weekly, there is a corrosive attack on the
Nation Magazine that could have been appeared in the New York Press:
On Bubble Wrap
The Nation vs. The Weekly Standard
by John Powers
An audience is like a broad. If you're indifferent,
Endsville.
--Frank Sinatra
AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the
journalistic lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the
magazine is on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen steadily in the
wake of the World Trade Center attacks. Its finances may actually break even (a
miracle in the world of political magazines). And its publishing adjunct,
Nation Books, is raking in money from two hot titles: Gore Vidal's Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace and Forbidden Truth by Jean-Charles Brisard and
Guillaume Dasquié. Indeed, everything's going so well that I feel kind of
churlish in pointing out what most on the left are unwilling to say: The Nation
is a profoundly dreary magazine.
Just compare it to another thin, ideologically driven rag,
The Weekly Standard, a right-wing publication currently approaching its measly
seventh anniversary. A few months ago, I began putting new issues of each side
by side on an end table and, to my surprise, discovered that while unread
copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, I always read
The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The
Standard is incomparably more alluring. As gray and unappetizing as homework,
The Nation makes you approach it in the same spirit that Democrats might vote
for Gray Davis -- where else can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by
saying, "We're having big fun over here on the right."
full: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/41/on-powers.php
The Los Angeles Weekly made virtually the same kind of
attack on Pacifica Radio, albeit from columnist Marc Cooper who fairly typifies
Nation Magazine ideology nowadays. In a positively rancid article on Porto
Alegre, Cooper also took people like Noam Chomsky and his supporters to task
for lacking panache. If one has ever seen the gnomish Marc Cooper in person or
heard his nasal, high-pitched voice, you would have to question his harping on
style.
In a 1990 brochure to advertisers, here's how the LA Weekly
described itself;
"Weekly readers like to buy, buy, buy. . . . They want
Perrier instead of water; croissants instead of toast; Rolex instead of Timex.
They earn champagne incomes to match their champagne tastes."
In 1994, the Village Voice bought the LA Weekly and deepened
the orientation to the Yuppie set, both culturally and politically. At the time
the Voice was owned by pet food magnate Leonard Stern, who had already pushed
the tabloid toward the center. Today's owners package conventionally liberal
politics with all sorts of articles about alternative lifestyles. In a distinct
gesture to rightist politics, it contains regular dispatches from Sylvia Foa, a
grating Zionist based in Israel.
The Voice is lashed from the right on a weekly basis by the
New York Press, founded in 1988 by Russ Smith. Smith's motivation in
challenging the establishment left was nearly identical to that described in
the LA Weekly article cited above. In a profile in the Oct. 1, 1998 NY Times,
Smith said the Voice had become ossified, full of "stuck-in-the-70's,
left-wing stuff" and pompous writing. "What about the 20-year-old who
just wants to hear about the Smashing Pumpkins' new album and doesn't want a
four-paragraph discourse on Baudelaire or Thomas Carlyle?"
As somebody who enjoys rightwing entertainment, including
radio shock jocks, I find New York Press simply unreadable. Most of it has
little to do with NYC and consists of long-winded navel-gazing by some of the
most boring people on the planet.
For example, in a piece called appropriately "First
Person" in the current issue, we learn from Rich Rickaby that:
"My family is the black sheep of the family. My mother
went through an embarrassing battle with alcohol while married to her second
husband who was alcoholic enough for the entire family. Not that one has to be
embarrassed about being alcoholic, especially since she overcame it, but when
Mom has to crawl her way out of the family gathering it leaves an impression.
Diane has three kids by two different men, both of whom are in jail now. One
for beating up on whores and the other for conspiring with his father to murder
someone. Her oldest son, Joe, has already been in jail by the age of 21 and has
since fled for West Virginia."
I think I'll stick with Thomas Carlyle.