REPRESSED MEMORIES OF OPRAH WINFREY
AMERICANS SHOULD CONSIDER HER WILLINGNESS TO OBLIGE ANY THOUGHT IF IT CAN CHARM AN AUDIENCE
The recent Oprah moment induces a walk down repressed-memory lane. In the early days of Talk TV, of Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich, Sally Jessy Raphael, and of course her current fameship, Oprah, the hungry hosts exploited whatever weirdness came their way. Of all the tawdry vehicles, none had the racing force of the satanic abuse frenzy, underwritten as it was by the equally fatuous fantasy of the repressed memory syndrome, a marquee item from the Cracker Jack box of pop psychotherapy.
The morning/afternoon shows were pulling in multiple personalities by the dozens ( cluster booking was an obvious necessity). They staggered America with salacious sagas of Satanic Ritual Abuse, involving sexual molestation of the very young. Then, with the expertise that only an unquenchable thirst for ratings and heartless ignorance can confer, the hosts “explained” how these arcane cruelties gave rise to multiple personalities and repressed memories.
Oprah showcased the very Queen of Multiples, Michelle Smith, author of Michelle Remembers (“the true story of a woman, who as a child … was delivered into the hands of the Antichrist!”). Smith, who was clearly on her way to self- declaration as a onewoman, full- voting UN state, claimed an astonishing 92 discrete personalities, all uncovered from the thicket of her unconscious through “regression hypnosis.” Naturally Oprah, then desperate for any rocket to take her to orbit as a full TV celebrity, was there, her empathy pack on full charge, to give the fractured Ms. Smith and her delusional or fabricated fantasies full airing.
Before long, Oprah was upmarket, the “multiples,” so to speak, diminished in number, and more “coherent” guests, Blist celebrities, revenants of faded sitcoms, life coach types and “affirming” authors began to levitate to the most sycophantic cushion on America’s most famous couch.
Who will forget — who can? — Suzanne Somers, impresario of the “thigh- master,” which was to upper- leg management what the lead boot was to sprinting. Somers quickly left orthopedics of the adipose for a higher calling — BioIdentics.
Ms. Somers had a featured turn on Oprah, and in her magazine ( O), as the lead proponent of bioidentical hormone therapy and self- declared “anti- aging expert.” As much as Ms. Somers horrified some in the medical community, Oprah the Good recognized “her truth,” and who’s to say Bio- identics and Somers’ Original Hormonal Happiness aren’t right up there with the discovery of insulin and the unwinding of the double helix?
Medicine has always been an Oprah specialty — that and of course the new- age, inner- child, bespoke spiritualism of the West Coast Hollywood flapdoodles. ( Gwyneth Paltrow’s fascination with her colon (and yours) and the Gospel of Goop are but secondhand Oprahisms.)
Her next real shaman — sorry shaperson — was none other than Baywatcher and erstwhile Jim Carrey mate Jenny McCarthy, who took full advantage of the Oprah TV town hall to warn America and the world of the dangers of vaccination and its infallible “connection” to autism. Medical advice on the calibre of Jenny McCarthy’s musings is normally (there is a God) very hard to come by. With Oprah’s help it was front of the bookstore. And what a boon. Jenny McCarthy or the Mayo Clinic? I know where my money is.
Were there world enough and time I would continue with her greatest medical discovery — Dr. Phil. How Western medicine has struggled along since the days of Hippocrates and Paracelsus without the attentions and manners of Dr. Phil, neither I nor you can know. But he is here now, sprung like Athena from Zeus’s head, out of dear Oprah’s equally pregnant cranium.
I offer these meanderings just as reminders of Oprah’s thought and career, now that she is, as some say, a front- runner for the presidency in 2020. As for that speech, well like a lot of her medical advice, it was a sham.
The speech, for all the slobbering praise it received — as performance, and performance only, it had merit — was one giant “You’re all so wonderful and brave” aria to the very audience she should have been castigating.
The Golden Globes themselves are sponsored by the derisory Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the house poodle of the film cabal’s PR wing. The speech itself, if it was anything, was a civil rights oration, not an indictment of the current epidemical sexual scandal, and poses the question: How does Rosa Parks’ name earn association with Harvey Weinstein’s and Kevin Spacey’s — “we all knew” — gruesome grabbings and gropings? Did Oprah call anyone out? Did Meryl Streep ovate, again?
Oprah was there as a “big enough name” to call the focus from the particular perpetrators, the Hollywood set that invited her, and needed her. She gave them her hand, and doubtless they will return the favour if needed. But should she run for president, Americans should give some thought to all the quackery she gave currency, and her willingness to oblige any feeble, false or fatuous thought if it can charm an audience.
There’s as much Trump in Oprah as there is in Trump. At least ( for now) Donald has stayed away from healing.