Comic Oprah

IN THE careless shorthand of Washington correspondents, the Administration’s Ohio fiasco was supposed to be an “Oprah-style” town meeting. If only. Had Oprah, rather than Madeleine Albright, gone out to endorse bombing Iraq, Saddam would now be in the same enfeebled state as those Texas cattle barons: within days, polls would have shown 98 per cent support for saturation bombing; the self-help guide How to Make Your Own Smart Bomb would have reached the top of the best-seller lists; the new CD by Oprah’s musical guest, Kenny G. Plays His Weapon of Mass Destruction, would have gone platinum; luxuriantly mustachioed men would be lining up to have their Saddamite growths pruned back to something closer to the trim upper lip of Oprah’s beau, Stedman Graham. Conversely, if Madeleine, rather than Oprah, had gone on TV and announced that, because of mad-cow disease, she would never eat another burger, the world would have shrugged and gone back to its Double Whopper with Cheese, and there would have been no trial in Amarillo.

It’s important to cling to that distinction when commentators start bandying about the word Oprahfication. In this fragmented media age, not many TV performers are privileged to become nouns and adjectives, admitted to the same select group as Thatcherism and Dickensian. If anything, Oprah Winfrey’s achievement is more impressive than Margaret Thatcher’s or Charles Dickens’s. Oprahfication doesn’t refer to anything as piffling as a partisan creed or a stylistic voice; as denounced by the Wall Street Journal, it means “public confession as a form of therapy,” but even that doesn’t quite cover it: rather, Oprahfication has become the routine designation for nothing less than the wholesale makeover of the nation, and then the world. Recently, it has been casually deployed to disparage not only President Clinton’s “national conversation on race” but also the new, breast-beating post-Di, post-Killer Nanny, flaccid-upper-lipped British public. Oprahfication, in that sense, is a term that has slipped its original moorings: Oprah herself had nothing very illuminating to say about the Princess of Wales, and her own conversations on race tend to be more robust, bringing together the author of the insightful tome Why Black People Tend to Shout (I forget the reason) with a studioful of prime exhibits.

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Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human-rights activist.

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IN THE careless shorthand of Washington correspondents, the Administration’s Ohio fiasco was supposed to be an “Oprah-style” town meeting. If only. Had Oprah, rather than Madeleine Albright, gone out to endorse bombing Iraq, Saddam would now be in the same enfeebled state as those Texas cattle barons: within days, polls would have shown 98 per cent support for saturation bombing; the self-help guide How to Make Your Own Smart Bomb would have reached the top of the best-seller lists; the new CD by Oprah’s musical guest, Kenny G. Plays His Weapon of Mass Destruction, would have gone platinum; luxuriantly mustachioed men would be lining up to have their Saddamite growths pruned back to something closer to the trim upper lip of Oprah’s beau, Stedman Graham. Conversely, if Madeleine, rather than Oprah, had gone on TV and announced that, because of mad-cow disease, she would never eat another burger, the world would have shrugged and gone back to its Double Whopper with Cheese, and there would have been no trial in Amarillo.

It’s important to cling to that distinction when commentators start bandying about the word Oprahfication. In this fragmented media age, not many TV performers are privileged to become nouns and adjectives, admitted to the same select group as Thatcherism and Dickensian. If anything, Oprah Winfrey’s achievement is more impressive than Margaret Thatcher’s or Charles Dickens’s. Oprahfication doesn’t refer to anything as piffling as a partisan creed or a stylistic voice; as denounced by the Wall Street Journal, it means “public confession as a form of therapy,” but even that doesn’t quite cover it: rather, Oprahfication has become the routine designation for nothing less than the wholesale makeover of the nation, and then the world. Recently, it has been casually deployed to disparage not only President Clinton’s “national conversation on race” but also the new, breast-beating post-Di, post-Killer Nanny, flaccid-upper-lipped British public. Oprahfication, in that sense, is a term that has slipped its original moorings: Oprah herself had nothing very illuminating to say about the Princess of Wales, and her own conversations on race tend to be more robust, bringing together the author of the insightful tome Why Black People Tend to Shout (I forget the reason) with a studioful of prime exhibits.