The Growth Industry of Betterment According to Oprah

This morning, my partner, Suzanne Pyrch, a New York City public school teacher gave me some very instructive lessons about how we, as a culture, are doing the most we can to achieve mediocrity. Her last line to me as she left for school was, "We used to think that the worst thing we could be was mediocre."

Her breakfast talk this morning was one of the finest tirades I have heard yet about what has gone wrong from the vantage point of someone who is on the front line in the fight to improve our children's lives. She had been enraged by Oprah's comments concerning Barack Obama over the weekend. All of us should heed her, because her response is not just angry but informed by her experiences as a teacher. According to Suzanne, all kids want to learn and thus all of us want to be better. But according to Suzanne, our best instincts are being hijacked by people like Oprah who appeal to that instinct and offer what is just mundane.

You can see it in the schools by the way they derail that instinct by the use of enforced tests of knowledge rather than teaching kids how to think. Oprah's misuse of that instinct comes from her basic assumption that we all want what she wants. Her idea of fulfillment is to have a great deal of wealth and celebrity. It offers her a platform to continue preaching the gospel of betterment. To Oprah, her crush from her childhood had grown up to be a mortician and that was laughable. But as Suzanne asked, "If she truly had loved him, would it have mattered that he was a mortician in that town? And why is there such contempt in revealing that past crush's life? Doesn't he provide a useful service to his community?" To Suzanne, Oprah's dismissal of this man's life and role were an insult and she does take love very seriously.

(It gives me pause, too. I didn't hear the comment, Suzanne reported it to me. But what does it say about Oprah's needs for love and to be loved? Admittedly, that is a question for another article.)

I am not a supporter of Barack Obama and have a feeling that his path to the presidential candidacy is what intrigues Oprah and makes her believe in him. Her "homework" on the subject of Obama tells her that his goals are the same as hers. And that is what is frightening. Were her goals the goals that all of us needed or wanted, that would be one thing. But the point is, they are not. A woman who amasses billions of dollars in a media empire has decidedly different goals from someone who wonders how to pay the mortgage and the credit card bills in the same month.

Sitting down and having to answer that question every month is so far removed from her purview that were she once again thrown into the severest form of anxiety most of us face, I am not sure she could even then understand what it is like never to have been removed from that anxiety. She lives in a world where just to have read a book implies bettering yourself. It doesn't matter that the person writing the book was an out and out liar and fabricator of what she considered the most important parts of reading a book -- he had bettered himself after a horrible start in life. The actual writing of the book, the kind of craft and attention to storyline that were totally absent from the book were not of interest to her because she was not able to see why that is of importance. And thus she missed from the point of opening the book why it was a fraud.

To take another example from her current history of wanting to foster betterment: If we think about her need to open her school in South Africa in order to better the lives of those young girls, we are then asked to forget that some of them have been molested by the very people Oprah put in charge of their welfare. Where had Oprah been while this was occurring? Is it that her idea of what makes for betterment of others should be obvious to all and so she never needs to know who she is entrusting with the care of these young people? It led me to think of how her own needs to be seen as helping others blinded her to who the people were she put in charge of her school.

This takes me to one of the more egregious examples of betterment that she has foisted on us and that is the incomprehensible Dr. Phil. Who in their right mind (and I may have answered the question right there) would think of offering counseling of any kind on television? It is through the perfect-while-absurd equivalent to the ideas of betterment espoused by Oprah. The whole point of therapy is to create a relationship that is there for your use in which you have the time and the privacy to work out your most secret and private conflicts that interfere with your life moving forward. Therapy should allow you to take the time it takes to open up and explore the reasons for and the solutions to the conflicts. However, the notion that therapy is just a way to better yourself and get a quick fix for your problems is part and parcel of the Oprah industry and Dr. Phil's approach therefore is a perfect auxiliary to her view of the world.

Which finally leads me to the question of why Oprah supports Barack Obama? I do believe that we are ready for a black president or a woman president. I do not believe, however, that given the evidence of her past push for betterment that we can take her endorsement of anyone at face value. Two questions come to my mind (Suzanne has already left for school and thus I cannot ask her opinion about this):

1. Why does Barack Obama want to align himself with this kind of trivialization of our best interests along with our best instincts? I am asking only what this says about his judgment. He has been quoted as saying that he is not sure her endorsement will even lead to votes for him. Perhaps that is why he had to suggest that he might make her the vice president.

2. The second point has more to do with how we think of ourselves as citizens of this country. Can we in fact appreciate what a true change for the better means? (Suzanne did ask me if we weren't tired of buying the fastest toys rather than enjoying the best of our culture.)

Knowing the needs of this country as it stands now, the questions become a bit more complex than a Dr. Phil quick fix can offer or the feel good approach of Oprah to how lives should be lived. I do not mean to demean either person but to voice my own household's frustrations and thoughts about something that is of dire consequences to this nation as we begin to caucus and vote in the primaries.

What we sacrifice to the expediency of making ourselves better without understanding what the real choices are could mean the end of our own democracy. With such a consequence at stake, it seems we need to give this a great deal more thought.

Comments

[OrangeSam]

Given the current state of affairs, perhaps we should aspire to mediocrity.

[OtayPanky]

In this letter, I will do my best to make my arguments against Dr. Phil clear and articulate. I plan to utilize numerous examples and maybe even some occasional humor so as not to strain your patience as I delve into immense detail about how few people realize that you probably know exactly what I mean.

Here's a quick review: Somebody has to put to rest the animosities that have kept various groups of people from enjoying anything other than superficial unity. That somebody can be you.

In any case, in these days of political correctness and the changing of how history is taught in schools to fulfill a particular agenda, Dr. Phil's attempts to take us all on a completely reckless ride into the unknown are much worse than mere classism. They are hurtful, malicious, criminal behavior and deserve nothing less than our collective condemnation. I can unquestionably suggest how Dr. Phil ought to behave. Ultimately, however, the burden of acting with moral rectitude lies with Dr. Phil himself. Let us now argue about Dr. Phil's initiatives, because in that is our only hope for the future.

[OtayPanky]

Given the disorderly political rhetoric of our times, Oprah takes things out of context, twists them around, and then neglects to provide decent referencing so the reader can check up on her. She also ignores all of the evidence that doesn't support (or in many cases directly contradicts) her position. And while we're on the subject, she has announced her intentions to alter, rewrite, or ignore past events to make them consistent with her current "reality".

While doing so may earn Oprah a gold star from the mush-for-brains allotheism crowd, I recently overheard a couple of perfidious thought police say that she commands an army of robots that live in the hollow center of the earth and produce earthquakes whenever they feel like shaking things up a bit on the surface. Here, again, we encounter the blurred thinking that is characteristic of this Oprah-induced era of slogans and propaganda.

What balderdash! What impudence! What treachery!

What Oprah apparently fails to realize is that she is frightened that we might enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. That's why she's trying so hard to prevent whistleblowers from reporting that I respect the English language and believe in the use of words as a means of communication. Immature anarchists like her, however, consider spoken communication as merely a set of noises uttered to excite emotions in muzzy-headed, fickle administrators in order to convince them to muster enough force to deny citizens the ability to draw their own conclusions about the potential for violence that she may be generating.

The irony is that her most superstitious nostrums are also her most lazy. As the French say, "Les extremes se touchent." Oprah is terrified that there might be an absolute reality outside herself, a reality that is what it is, regardless of her wishes, theories, hopes, daydreams, or decrees. And that's what writing this sort of letter is all about. It's a way to protect the interests of the general public against the greed and unreason of irritable rubes.