RYNSA: WORDS

Chicago writer, performer, teacher, and filmmaker, Robyn Okrant, has just completed a new book chronicling a year of (get this) living according to the advice of media-mogul billionaire and cultural icon, Oprah Winfrey. No, no, really… one full, calendar year! Nutz.

From her website, Ms. Okrant coyly explains the impetus behind Living Oprah:

“I believe Oprah to be the single most influential person in the media today – especially when it comes to impacting women… I wondered what would happen if one of us committed ourselves whole-heartedly to her lifestyle suggestions. Would the financial and time costs of living as Oprah prescribes be worth the results?”

Honestly, there’s no way I could do something as masochistic as this. Beyond the everyday tedium of having to watch Oprah, read Oprah, and then do Oprah’s bidding, in the end I’m fairly certain I would not have learned anything new. I don’t need to be water-boarded, for example, to know that torture sucks, and I certainly don’t need to follow the half-brained, neoliberal, new age, new thought nonsense of Oprah frickin’ Winfrey to know that her ideologies are fundamentally corrupt. Ultimately, in my estimation of things, this life-style stunt amounts to a kind of death by a thousand cuts, and it’s definitely not worth all the hardship. I’d much prefer a quick and painless ending.

That said, I must admit that I’m happy Ms. Okrant was more courageous than me. She is clearly willing to subject herself to whole lot of costly, sanctimonious, froo-froo, snake-oil bullshit, and she should be lauded for her resolve through what must have been a very difficult year. But more than that, Orkant has decided to write about her experience and expose (we can only hope) the absurdity of Oprah’s worldview, to which I am exceptionally grateful. It’s high-time the suburban set were confronted with the dangerous bigotry of their televised savior’s magical thinking. Maybe Living Oprah, the book, is just the literary insight we need to finally stop ourselves from living Oprah, the phenomenon.

LINKS:
Living Oprah Blog
Chicago Tribune Article
NPR’s All Things Considered
MSNBC Report

There are a handful of really good talk radio shows out there that deal with media in popular culture. One of my favorites is Media Matters with Bob McChesney. Granted, Mr. McChesney is an academic steeped in the traditions of formal, heady, and slightly monotone conversation styles, but he also has really interesting guests of whom he asks really interesting questions. I always feel like I’ve just left an excellent cultural studies lecture immediately following a Media Matters episode.

Anyway, last week there was a particularly intriguing interview with Janice Peck, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who recently published a new book entitled “The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era.” Basically, Peck aligns Oprah’s success (she’s an absolutely massive media presence stateside) with the rise of neoliberalism, an economic ideology that became a significant political force in the 1980’s, and with sweeping consequences on/for the globalization of today.

Having not read the book I cannot comment on its quality. But the interview on Media Matters was fascinating predominantly because it was one of the first, really articulate, well-constructed criticisms of the Oprah machine I have ever heard. And it is most definitely a machine–an empire of television, magazines, books, websites, and so on, each churning out Oprah’s particular brand of ‘informed’ public discourse. This media goliath, supported mainly by suburban, middle-class white girls, is very, very lucrative. According to Peck, Oprah Inc., if you will, is worth over two billion dollars!  I suppose it’s actually quite amazing, in a horrific, overdose of snake-oil kinda way.

On that note, I must admit that I enjoyed Peck’s criticism because it also vindicated me for much of what I have felt about Oprah for years, ever since I was a kid back in high school, when I was just starting to develop a more sophisticated socio-economic and political consciousness. Painfully, I distinctly remember being forced to listen to some of my least-inspiring instructors, even up through college, laud Oprah with near religious zealotry for the now very popular Book Club, which they believed would eventually do more for American literacy than the classroom ever could.

“Hmph,” I would grunt.  Even then I could smell the cow manure of idolotry.  

In any case, Oprah is certainly a force with which to be reckoned. I hope Ms. Peck’s text will go a long way in expanding the conversation to include larger cultural (read: economic and political) trends.  Though, honestly, I suspect it’s just going to piss off advertisers and housewives alike.

NOTE:

I did not include any links in this post to Oprah’s many (business) web ventures. You’re gonna have to do that on your own.