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.

Quite a few sites about the Law of Attraction and The Secret reference the following quote from our favorite Nice Danish Boy:

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

The Secret, the terrific Oprah-endorsed self-help philosophy that advocates shunning negative influences, including people who are unhappy, disenfranchised, down on their luck, or sick (who, according to the Secret followers, brought their own misfortune on themselves and are trying to bring down the rest of us with their negativity). If you haven't been able to "manifest" the man, woman, or Coach purse of your dreams, it's probably because you're still talking to your cancer-stricken friend. Apparently now you can watch The Secret anytime on Time Warner Cable New York -- for a fee, of course -- on their On Demand channel. It's not visible in this picture (taken on the 7 train Friday afternoon), but the ad's background is made up of names: Alexander Graham Bell, Leonardo DaVinci, Marie Curie, Thomas Jefferson, Issac Newton, Gottfried Liebnitz (sic; I've always seen it written "Leibniz"), Baruch Spinoza, Victor Hugo, etc., etc., etc ... If I dispose of -- I mean, avoid -- unhappy people, perhaps I too can manifest myself talent, fame, and fortune. Maybe I can write a 1200-page novel, discover several new chemical elements, and invent calculus while I'm at it. Aren't you excited for me? No. Then go away, you're of no use to me and my Secret powers. (If I haven't made myself ridiculously clear yet, I find the 'Nazi philosophy' element of The Secret justalittle disconcerting.)

Of the many articles and posts that rightly criticize The Secret and Oprah's irresponsible promotion of the idiotic phenomenon, I have yet to see one that points out one of the #1 problems with The Secret book and DVD: it's, uh, kind of Nazi philosophy. Adorno would agree, don'tcha think?

"The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorum-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness." -- Theodor Adorno.