Salvation Through Oprah...

Postured high in lofty realms where God is all sunshine and lollipops, and "Jesus Saves" bumper stickers are both the cause of and solution to all life's problems, another form of religious fervor has bubbled its way into this roiling mess of North American soul searching. In all its greasy, omnipresent power, the manufactured ego-deity of Oprah permeates the media to bless her minions. Her face appears on every issue of her own magazine, her opinion is canonized daily on her television show with bold statements and images, reminding everyone what she does to save the world. People buy into it too, with empty, painful smiles. But surely there must be the occasional suspicious question as to how or why so many nod their heads in perfect, holy agreement.
And of course, how can we forget her book club and its rather gooey mixture of nauseating self-help, flimsy spirituality, and the occasional literary piece, all marked with her name as if she has something to do with their existence. No surprise that I might take exception with that.

The best thing about television is that you can change the channel whenever you want, or just shut the damned thing off. I don't have to spend my afternoons watching Oprah pose for all her camera closeups, reiterating how she spends her money and time saving the souls of (wo)mankind and buying tennis shoes for kids. But I tell you, I almost get an aneurysm when I go into a bookstore and find a sticker bearing her name, pasted across the cover of a book she's had no part in writing. Does her Christ complex give her license to tag everything with her own vacuous approval? What could she possibly have to offer to the literary world?

Right away, I know some of you will jump and and say, "Well dammit Harry, I never would have read East of Eden if it hadn't been for Oprah. Fair enough, but perhaps you could contemplate that statement for a moment. Are you suggesting that your slovenly mind was not intuitive enough to start seeking out good literature on its own? Steinbeck, Faulkner, Morrison... all these great writers' reputations were not enough to compel you to be inquisitive about them? It took the almighty Oprah, someone without any literary background or real education, someone who has nothing to offer but superficial and ultimately meaningless commercialism -- someone you do not even know, to compel you? You would rather concede that you take your cues in life from a network media mogul than your own discernment? Then I wish you would never have read East of Eden at all. Leave all those wonderful books alone. Better yet, maybe you can find a recorded copy of Oprah reading one of those books so you don't have to tire out your poor, poor brain.

Awhile back, Rex Murphy, one of Canada's best critical commentators, wrote a scathing piece on Oprah's book club. Titled The Author Eater, and now found in his book of essays called Points of View, Murphy's article rails against Oprah's book club on two fronts. He observes how she leeches the uniqueness out of good books, making them a byproduct of her "Oprahness", and then marketing them as if they were products of her own ideas. He also comments on the quality of the books in her club, those self-help Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra and Chicken Soup for the Soul type books that use smiley-face, booster shots of nonsense to lull the masses into happy, generic slumber. In this instance, I think Rex hits the nail on the head. Celebrity is becoming synonymous with intellectual opinion, an absurd nightmare in its own right. We race to bookshelves to read books because glamorous (at least when they have makeup on) people tell us to. And this hurts both sides of the equation. Established authors now grovel at the accursed throne to get their names mentioned, knowing that the majority of readers base their book choices on coerced popular demand. Who in their right mind would want to be mentioned alongside Deepak Chopra anyways?

Ever get that gnawing feeling that something is wrong with the way people perceive the world? That somehow we are moving further and further away from complex thought and dialogue, away from intimate discussion, towards some weird, mechanized form of interaction? How about how difficult we often find it to articulate our ideas or feelings about something personal and important? Or how about how little rationale we use when forming opinion? You can thank Oprah for this, along with a plethora of other like-minded sycophants out there. She has blended weak entertainment with weak commentary, feeding on the ever growing demographic of people who are comfortable to have others think for them, and packaging her ego and need for attention into a massive pandemic of intellectual apathy. Hurrah.