Yet today, when the slacker exclamation "whatever" passes for political statement, the influence of British vitriol on American letters may be issuing its last gasp. The Nation's editors, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Victor Navasky, have imposed a writers' cease-fire, sending Cockburn into tentative verbal withdrawal, and launching Hitchens, we hope, into a silent calm before the dialectical storm.

The internecine battles at The Nation once had the entertaining air of a left-wing ideological spectacle. Cockburn would routinely bark at the mild-mannered Navasky, and insult Hitchens for his Trotskyite socialism; Hitchens for his part once declared that Cockburn "hasn't got what it might take to be a Commie." But apparently Navasky has tired of the vitriol. Issuing euphemisms usually reserved for right-wing conservatives like William Bennett and the late Alan Bloom, Navasky insisted that the new Nation be a forum for "humanistic discourse." Redesigned to catch up to the aesthetics of the early 70s, The Nation has finally succumbed to the pressures of commodity fetishism. Gone is the belief that the anti-market was its market. Bold, five-color covers; a bar code on its front-page; a new editor; a leash on its two most valuable socialist attack dogs; its most radical editor, JoAnn Wypijewski, on leave--The Nation, founded over a century ago, is adapting to the culture of the 1990s.

There are reasons to be troubled Navasky's cap on the petulant Brits. Even though Hitchens told the Village Voice that he hadn't read Navasky's editorial directive because he had thrown it out, the two columnists have ceased quarreling over important debates. While the sparring matches of old made the most raucous Internet flame wars seem like a stuffy, if slightly psychotic Edwardian cocktail party, the Cockburn/Hitchens debates at least stood for the dying art of poison penship. And The Nation was one of the few remaining habitats for that increasingly endangered species: the public intellectual, unsubsidized by think-tank, corporation, or political party. The weekly battles were a sign that some life was left in that long tradition.

Hitchens, of course, has been busy enough building his brand elsewhere -- in his Vanity Fair column and on CNN's Crossfire. (His Comedy Central gig ended after he announced, during a live broadcast, that the Reagan's were "a pretty fucking weird family.") Meanwhile, Cockburn's work has begun to slip. Seemingly war-wearied by his tireless struggle during the Reagan-Bush years, the radical journalist's recently published memoirs, The Golden Age Is in Us, seemed premature and fragmentary. Cockburn's critiques, preoccupied with regional environmental concerns, have become increasingly erratic, occasionally overshadowed by the environmental politics of the West Coast deciduous forests, coastal ecosystems, and other local, endangered species of flora and fauna. The master stylist's prose has become stilted and sloppy, and Cockburn's energies have come across more listless than anything else.

That's why we're encouraged by Cockburn's return to the offensive. In a recent "Beat the Devil" column, Cockburn attacked Navasky for his admitted preference for Barnes and Noble's superstore democracy. "Books are born free, but everywhere they are in chains," Navasky wrote in a June New York Times op-ed. While lamenting the demise of independent bookstores, like New York's troubled Shakespeare and Co., Navasky contended that Barnes and Noble wasn't without cultural and political value. "At a time when privatization is in the air (and on land and in cyberspace, too), these chains seem intent on taking private space into the public sphere," he wrote.

Long dormant, Mt. Cockburn erupted. "So it's come to this," he blasted in The Nation. "A bookstore chain puts out some armchairs, sells coffee and pastries, and we get excited talk about big strides forward in the creation of a public sphere. Why not take another step and say that shopping malls -- replete with food courts -- constitute the public sphere today? Why just a word for the Riggio brothers [the owners of Barnes and Noble]? Why not a clap on the back for McDonald's?"

While it's good to see some of the old bombast return to the new Nation, we can't help note the downsizing in subject matter. With the heady days of Breshnev and command economies behind them, the few remaining public intellectuals have turned to debating the merits of strip malls and Starbucks. We've gone from denouncing banana republic imperialism to celebrating the Banana Republic® fall line. What's next -- the political economy of Staples?

-- A.R. (July 26, 1996)