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O, Brother

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5/10/00 4:40 p.m.
O, Brother
The Oprah mag serves up a theology for idiots.

By Roderick Boyd, freelance writer

here is a conservative argument to be made for the success of Oprah Winfrey and her attendant popularity. She worked her way up through bone-crushing poverty and horrific family dysfunction, and if nothing else she’s not the Ricki Lake, Sally Jesse Raphael, Phil Donahue sort, dripping with ratings-driven, malignant faux empathy. It’s clear she tries hard to be nice, maybe even thoughtful. More impressively, she has inspired millions to once again visit bookstores.

To be fair, most of the books she advocates are either pointless novels by uber-liberals like Anna Quindlen, or New Agey screeds. But reading is still better than not reading, so she gets points for that too. Thus by daytime-TV standards she’s the proverbial rara avis. She is well spoken and aware, and appeals to a wide swath of celebrities, retirees, female college students, and — most importantly — advertisers, all of whom conspire to make her treacly gabfest a force of television nature. It’s very hard to characterize Oprah as anything other than a glaring triumph.

Certainly, in economic terms, it’s very hard to characterize Oprah as anything other than very rich. You would have to try very hard to find a Forbes list of the most highly paid entertainers where she is not near the top of the list. You would have to look some eleven years back to find the last time she wasn’t earning a comfortable eight-figure income. To give you a little perspective here, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were also on the list then; Sly Stallone anchored it from the Hollywood end. They’re on VH-1, she’s still around.

On the other hand, she has a new magazine out and it’s abundantly clear we’re dealing with a glaring success whose success has glaringly gone to her head.

Oprah’s magazine is called O, The Oprah Magazine. We are not making this up. It is dedicated to advocating the sort of life and lifestyle that is at the core of Oprah’s tele-evangelizing: With candles and angels and spirituality and lots and lots of advice from New Age gurus with books to sell, we can all get to the Great Joy Place. The Great Joy Place is where you go when you "Live Your Best Life!" That is the first issue’s slogan anyhow, and an important one, since there may well be people out there buying magazines who don’t want to live their best life. Never mind that the great joy place sounds like something lifted from The Joy of Sex; all we can conclude about great joy and its attendant place is that Oprah says it can only happen if we’re doing what we want all the time and following our hearts’ call. Or something.

But I digress. Whatever it is we need to be happy, Oprah knows that what we need first is advice. And Oprah backed up the truck on the advice front. Here’s her best-selling physical-fitness guru Bob Greene on getting into great shape: "Don’t smoke, exercise three times a week and eat a low-fat diet." Who could not be humbled by such fresh thinking on this rarely written about and discussed topic? Then there’s super-best-selling financial columnist Suze Orman telling a confused correspondent not to lend money to a deadbeat relative, at least not until he gets a job and can repay some back. The thanks of a weary nation are due you, Suze. Let us not overlook the searing insight of best-selling relationship mechanic Philip McGraw, Ph.D., who counsels a woman who lies a lot that she has a problem with honesty. Advice that’s readable and good for you too, sort of like cold milk and fresh cookies, assuming that you aren’t lactose intolerant, or suffering from diabetes.

Now it is no great sin assuming that your readers or viewers are morons — there are several cable networks kept alive by this assumption — and designing the content accordingly. Cosmopolitan has had a wonderful run pitching a combination of the Happy Hooker meets the Kama Sutra to 23-year-old office assistants whose libido generally outstrips their education. But there are some aspects of Oprah and her magazine (we can safely assume that they are one and the same) that are informed less by noble concerns about the spiritual health of the populace, and more by the egocentric needs of a centimillionaire with a chip on her shoulder.

Look at the vaunted spirituality craze she’s mining. Instead of discussing moral views, worship, the soul’s relationship to eternity or consequences, we get lists ("What would make you happy today?") and calendars ("Invite an acquaintance to lunch today") designed to tap your personal courage. Instead of comparing and contrasting the strengths or faults of the world’s major religions, we get quotes from Maya Angelou: "When people show you who they really are, believe them." Right on. Of course, you can also get the musings of the terrible poet, and middling folk singer, Jewel, whose diary is excerpted to show the courage involved in being a beautiful, rich folk singer. Or a rich, horrible poet. Oprah and her team seem to think that a lot of their readers are afraid, thus the "courage" thrust. I think a lot of their readers are idiots, and we all know that believing in this stuff requires some guts, so they’re probably on to something with the courage tack. Here’s the odd thing though: Right and wrong, God or sin, however we may know them, aren’t mentioned at all. Spirituality to Oprah is a series of low-fat recipes and days off in art museums and engaging long-lost friends or making new aquaintances. Pretty deep, huh?

Spirituality is quite a nice thing, and who’s against overcoming obstacles, self-imposed and otherwise? And why raise a word against courage? But let’s be candid here: Oprah and her magazine are about selling Oprah and her magazine. I read the whole damn thing cover to cover several times, and saw lots of ads and content designed to inspire my inner menopausal woman, but I couldn’t get a sense of how any of this connected to my soul. The great joy place may be denied you for now, but at least you’ll have the exercise tips and decorating ideas to fall back on.

This disconnect cuts to the core of Oprah: She did not get to be one of America’s richest people by attempting to plumb the depths of truth, either spiritual or cultural. She lobs softballs at vapor heads like Julia Roberts and Cindy Crawford and basks in the ratings. Fine. Next to the circus maximus of her competition, perhaps she is indeed a saint. But she also takes you for a fool, thinking you’re so inept that mere decoration ideas can transplant belief and faith; that giving away homemade cookies or ringing up an old friend is a worldview.

Say what you will about Martha Stewart and her ilk, but to them, pressed flowers are simply dead bloody flowers with perfume that look pretty, and not some far-reaching statement of the inner self. No one should begrudge Oprah her millions and her success, but her attempt to pass off her checklist of pleasurable experiences — massages, good food, candles, and aromatherapy — as the stuff of the eternal soul is alternately preposterous and ugly. Preposterous because she appears to be getting away with it sight unseen, and ugly because the Godhead of this church of the spiritually retarded is booking nearly nine figures a year, slinging stuff that wouldn’t get taken seriously in the writers’ room of an average sitcom.

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