Why I still hate Oprah Winfrey

For a while I thought I had gotten over my hatred of Oprah Winfrey. My last post inspired some rather nasty racist name calling. So I thought about taking it easy on her.

None of the commentors in my original post did. Those commentors used the N word. People like that just seem plain dangerous to me. Not in the controlled anti-social way, like myself. But in a primal I-just-shot-your-mama-now go-to-your-room kinda way.

Nevertheless, Oprah does deserve a fair amount of the criticism she gets. For instance in a recent Salon article took her to task over her endorsement of a silly self help book The Secret.

The article mainly rehashes several points that many other critics have been making for years. But the author does a good job of showing how the criticisms when taken together show that Oprah is endorsing and promoting a kind of "culture."

For instance, Oprah writes 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."

That statement is just sickening and offensive. And I do sickening and offensive for a living. I don't need to tell you that her idiotic statement is an indictment of starving children. Who I guess brought all of their misery on themselves by crying too much when they got hungry.

Actually I probably did need to tell you how stupid her belief system is. Way too many people in the United States fall for this New Age Hocus Pocus. Allthough Oprah did not come up with this nuttiness, she has profited from it. And while she did not create Oprah Culture from scratch she is hyping it to an eager and gullible audience.

What's Oprah Culture?

"It's a culture where superstition is "spirituality," illiteracy is "authenticity," and schoolmarm moralism is "character." It's a culture where people apologize by saying, "I'm sorry you took offense at what I said," and forgive by saying, "I'm not angry at you anymore, I'm grateful to you for teaching me not to trust shitheads like you."

And [here's] the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices. Engagement, curiosity and active awe are in short supply these days, and it's sickening to see them devalued and misrepresented."

Oprah Culture combines some of the worst aspects of Eastern and Western Philosophy. One part of hedonistic materialism with an equal dose of "false spiritualism."

I wished Americans were strong enough to resist the false positism that Oprah offered, but I bet we aren't.