Linkage: Why I hate Oprah

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I have always detested Oprah. Her seemingly endless vanity and self-aggrandizement. The "oh I was so poor as a child and look how wonderful I am now" rags to riches life history repeated over and over in the books she recommends in her book club. Her apparent inability to make a genuine gesture or crack a real smile, or indeed to do anything at all without several billion people looking on.

Now, in this article from Salon.com I'm glad to see others observing cracks in the facade.

Apparently, the big O has put her significant muscle behind one of those insidious and unpleasant self-help books, "The Secret." The idea is that you, too, can get rich if you just wish hard enough. The authors certainly did - but didn't someone say something about a sucker born every minute? The Salon commentator points out that this book is, in fact, no better than a scam, a huge pyramid scheme, with the horrible O right there *plop* on the top:

But what really makes “The Secret” more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn’t just endorsed “The Secret”; she’s championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why “venality”? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about “The Secret” on her Web site, “the energy you put into the world — both good and bad — is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.” “Venality,” because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, “You cannot ‘catch’ anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought.” “Venality,” because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”

Comments

keeping the people down, one by one

[lidocafe.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree with you more, not only about Oprah, but about this kind of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps stuff that tells the poor and oppressed they're only poor and oppressed because they aren't trying hard enough. I've just been teaching Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and he attacks the same argument, the American dream spiel that keeps people poor by having them focus not on the system that keeps them down but on finding a crevice to cling to so that they can pull themselves up the rockface of capitalism.

It's all about the self, is it? I once read an fascinating article by Barbara Ehrenreich (I probably spelled that incorrectly). She analyzed breast cancer sufferers and survivors as a sort of linguistic community. In the process, she pointed out that the focus on "lifestyle" in our research on and discussions of cancer, while rooted in common sense, has become extreme and lets industry, which has been systemtaically poisoning the world for some time, off the hook.

If you're sick or poor or thrown in prison without due process, well, maybe you're just not trying enough, maybe you just aren't willing your success. What a load of crap.

Re: keeping the people down, one by one

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and there's a particularly nasty spin to this in the cancer community - where somehow you can "cure" yourself if you are a good person, or if you think good thoughts or whatever, whatever. Yes, no doubt positive thinking and praying and the rest does wonders; sometimes cancer kills good people and there are types of cancer that no kind of "energy" or "vibration from the universe" is going to cure.