Aliya Sternstein: Public failure, private redemption

As the final issues of now-defunct magazine Talk dwindle at the checkout counter of CVS, I can't help but feel sorry for editor and founder Tina Brown.

I also can't help but feel bad for recording artist Mariah Carey and former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay.

Admittedly, I may be the only person who shares these sentiments. The faults of these two divas and one energy dealer are clear. They should, deservedly, drop out of the public eye for a bit. Brown should baste for basing a magazine on her celebrity, Carey should take a pay cut on her next album after her last record company severed ties before we even got to hear anything good and Enron executives -- if proven guilty -- should be behind bars for stealing money and swindling investors, including the president's mother-in-law.

However, a part of me hopes that these public failures will lead to private revelations for the three egomaniacs -- and for the rest of us. These people all lacked a fundamental drive -- whether it be a substantive purpose behind a magazine, an artistic vision for an album or honest debt reporting. They all shared a certain emptiness of purpose that, nevertheless, brought them celebrity status.

It's old news that our society relishes the notion of celebrity -- Robert Downey Jr., Julia Roberts, Ms. Teeny Bopper of the Month. We need and want to know about their love lives and drug habits.

And so, there will always be Tina Browns stylishly printing witty, irreverent magazines like Vanity Fair and Talk.

There will always be Mariahs harmonizing with flashy record labels like CBS and EMI-owned Virgin Records, which bought out her contract to the tune of $28 million dollars last week after recording only one less-than-successful album.

There will always be white-collar criminals sneaking off with bonuses and stock options like the once-golden leaders of Enron, who now stand accused of all manner of illegal and unethical business practices and bankrupting the seventh largest corporation in America -- leaving a lot of Houston unemployed and a lot of investors without their children's college tuition. Pop goes the money, music and mags.

As a columnist, I'll eventually pop, too -- in maybe 10 or so weeks. I'll leave the public arena and go back to being the girl known only by her mom, dad, sister and a few friends as the fool who spills spaghetti sauce on her pants at dinner. Like Tina, Mariah and the alleged Enron villains, I'll find another venue. But I hope we're all different after the camera flashes. And I hope the change is for the better.

As students at a prestigious, selective Ivy League university, we're all mini-Mariahs belting out Ivy League pomposity, whether we like it or not. It's part of the insulated, pampered territory -- quite unlike little known Maidenhead, England where Tina was born, the small Long Island high school Mariah attended and the little Omaha gas company that fathered energy giant Enron. More or less, we all come from obscurity.

What is there to learn from all the burst bubbles? That fame and public success are fickle. What's enduring is personal growth, the kind that's quiet and shared by family and close friends. Seems obvious enough.

We can all learn this before we're kicked off the Ivy stage. Aside from good GPAs and internships, we have to rack up personal missions. We have to give thought to how we're going to change the world, how we're going to improve our personal and family relationships. That's the price of fame -- duty.

Maybe Tina will one day prove Andrew Sullivan wrong. The New Republic senior editor and Talk contributor who worked with Tina on an article about religion wrote in a seething Wall Street Journal column last week, "When a grown-up editor can actually ask a writer about what's 'hot' in the questions of eternal life, the fate of the soul, or of the meaning of existence, you have to wonder if, deep inside her, that's all she actually sees."

Ouch. She should take some quiet time, stop the Talk. She may just surprise us all, if her post-dethronement words thus far are any indication. She told The New York Times, "There is nobody more boring than the undefeated. Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it. I'm very proud of having taken the risk."

Yes, she took a risk -- along with Mariah and Enron and us college kids. We all fail at some point. I can't fault her for trying, but I won't buy the next Tina Brown magazine that pops up on the CVS counter if it's entitled Diva with a cover featuring a topless Mariah. On the other hand, I would pick up the publication if it pictured Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins.

Aliya Sternstein is a senior Psychology major from Potomac, Md.

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