Primrose Road

(Some of the) reasons I find Oprah Winfrey repulsive:

1. She's elitist, building a school in South Africa that won't necessarily help to educate young girls but will absolutely create an instant upper class of the "chosen," and presenting a model of "big give" charity that simply involves giving people things, often with an underlying-but-still-pretty-obvious advertising-related motivation.

2. She and her team of doctors support pseudoscientific beliefs in reiki, vitamins-as-medicine, and past-life regression.

3. She regularly promotes The Secret, which is at best bullshit and at worst fascist philosophy. (And somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is "selfishness" or "self-absorption.")

4. She seems to have a bit of a God complex, no?

A 35-year-old writer in Chicago has started the Living Oprah blog, in which she will chronicle her attempts to follow all of Oprah's "lifestyle suggestions" for a year. This will be amazing.

According to Oprahdoctor Michael Roizen (an MD who, like Mehmet Oz, seems a bit too friendly towards alternative medicine), my "RealAge" is 24.9, younger than my real age, because I take my medications as directed, wear my seatbelt, don't talk on my cell phone while driving, eat fruit, and ... because my parents are still married. While Roizen's test can be a useful tool for encouraging people to start exercising, eat better, and quit smoking, I am not pleased with the implications that the children of divorce, those who do not attend a place of worship at least once a week, and those who don't buy into the vitamin supplement business are somehow in worse health than others.

The site recommends that I manage my allergies better, get a larger car (!!!!!), take vitamin E and omega-3 supplements, and get a dog.

In the test-prep classes I teach during the summer, we advise students to avoid the "1/2 right, 1/2 wrong" answer trap ... I think we may also need to advise Internetters and TV-watchers against the "1/2 good medical advice, 1/2 woo" answer trap as well.

Oprah terrifies me. The other day she had a psychiatrist on her show who "hypnotized" the audience so that they could "remember" past lives. Oprah and Dr. Mehmet Oz ("America's Doctor" and actual surgeon) looked on excitedly and gullibly.

The psychiatrist then hypnotized Dr. Oz, who said, "We don't have to advocate [the therapy], but we do have to evaluate it" and compared it to the once-new idea of doctors washing their hands before delivering babies. This obviously isn't a fair analogy because while bacteria were invisible to the naked eye, they could be perceived via the already-invented microscope.

And finally,

"Dr. Oz says he does feel like there is a collective unconsciousness out there. "I actually in my heart think that all of our minds are connected and all of these minds in history are then reflected, and we're feeding into this energy system that we can tap into. It's like karma. You can bounce into it. It bounces you back," he says. "So what I really think we want to do is challenge people to the belief and understanding that life is not as real as it seems. There's other stuff out there."

"Other stuff" is a matter of belief, but Dr. Oz doesn't present it that way. I certainly wouldn't want my heart surgeon thinking about collective unconsciousness and bouncy karma in the same way he thinks about my heart.

And she's doing another show on past-life regression on 6/17, which most likely means that past-life regression is going to become a new Oprah-induced fad that allows people to think (and make stuff up) about themselves. Granted, it's not as scary as the Nazi-philosophy-like The Secret, and not as elitist as her funding a school in South Africa that does little more than create an instant upper class, but it's still pretty damn stultifying.