Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: Why You Can't Sue Your Rapist in Federal Court, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (May 24, 2000)
"When you think about a rape in a college dormitory, do you think about interstate commerce?"
Political Pulse: Ho Hum, the Shootings Go On, by William Schneider (May 24, 2000)
So far, a tidal wave of public support for gun control has not swept over American politics.
Legal Affairs: How the Embargo Hurts Cubans and Helps Castro, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (May 19, 2000)
Easing the embargo, if done with care, could change Cuba for the better. It could hardly make things worse.
Political Pulse: Ratchet Back a Bit, Al, by William Schneider (May 17, 2000)
Americans may not be eager for change, but they may think Gore is going over the top against Bush.
Social Studies: Forget About China -- Can Trade Be Saved From the WTO?, by Jonathan Rauch (May 16, 2000)
For anti-trade protesters, the WTO is a godsend. It is the Conqueror Worm of global capitalism.
Legal Affairs: Elián: An Excess of Certitude and Ideology on All Sides, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (May 12, 2000)
Elián's story may have generated more righteousness than Monica's, Ollie's, or Alger's. Why do I have doubts?
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Media:Oprah Waldo Emerson
May 24, 2000
Now that O magazine, Oprah Winfrey's latest effort, is a gigantic, hair-on-fire success, thoughtful people everywhere are confronted with an age-old question: What exactly is the point of Oprah?
We media divines know the answer, of course: There is no point at all to Oprah, or no serious point. She's just the feel-good guru of the couch-marooned, Wal-Mart-cruising masses. The bizarre fixation of lumpen moms to whom she hawks tearjerker novels and other texts of lower-middlebrow grade. A mogul on a power trip.
Knowing all this with our usual certainty, we've had an absolute romp with O these past few weeks. While the first issue of the Hearst-published monthly instantly sold out and went into a new printing -- 1.6 million copies and counting -- we've giggled ourselves senseless. "I am holding in my hand the premier issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, and wondering who would pay $2.95 for 318 pages of self-indulgence," said a columnist in The (Phoenix) Arizona Republic. "Find somewhere else to spend $2.95. At best you'll find O self-absorbed drivel, at worst the soft-focus photos and cloying affirmations will make you itch for Popular Mechanics," said another in the St. Petersburg Times.
The Washington Post and The Village Voice offered wickedly arch readings of O. The Voice's columnist Michael Musto noted that at the New York launch party for her magazine, Oprah said, "On the journey, the journey, the journey, we are all inspired by people who lift us up." Musto then extended several claws to suggestively add: "Yes, yes, yes -- people like her best friend, Gayle King, for whom Oprah has, by her own admission, bought a pool, a nanny, and a BMW."
Even The Straits Times of Singapore got into the act, with columnist Zuraidah Ibrahim opining that while Oprah's mag is already sold out at most stores (in Singapore?!), its content is not terribly worthy: "It sounds suspiciously like psycho-babble after a while. But the feel-good validation is obviously the kind of talk that brings in the money."
Alert media anthropologists will note a theme here. All the above-quoted passages refer somehow to money, the first two mentioning the cover price of the magazine in what I would venture, if you'll excuse my psycho-babble, is an unconscious need to have a dollar sign appear in close proximity to Oprah's name. Because, let's face it, money is our profession's real problem with Oprah. She's in the same business as the rest of us, but she's much richer.
How did that happen? I mean, we're all so smart and we've worked so hard and she's from, like, Mississippi or something and didn't go to school anywhere special (did she even go to college?) or win one of the better summer internships, and here she just sashays in and dreams up a magazine and expects the world to buy it -- and it does! Most of us can't even get famous in our hometowns, and Oprah has the whole U.S.A. at her feet. And now she's conquered Singapore!
To the media class, Oprah is the epitome of life's bottomless cruelty. She drives us almost as crazy as Martha Stewart does. Which is why we've scoured O for every moment of bad New Agey taste we can find -- the "courage diary" that she recommends readers start keeping; the pullout cards with inspirational quotations that followers are advised to tape on their mirrors; the moment when she asks Camille Cosby, in an interview, "Are you aware of your womanness?"
Too bad we can't put aside our resentment long enough to note what's really happening inside this magazine, and with Oprah's movement. The woman whose name was once synonymous with victimhood -- because that was her television show's calling card -- has become an evangelist of a very different faith.
O is devoid of whining, and so is Oprah, and she and her assorted pop philosophers and lifestyle experts have done something remarkable with New Age thinking. They've thrown out the channeling, the crystals, and the chanting, and boiled it down to its practical essence, returned it to its 19th-century roots. The spiritual matters more than the material, says O. Self-reliance is the key to a good life. Hard work is happiness. The world is what you make of it.
Sure, the packaging is pure kitsch, a succession of hilarious Hallmark-goes-Zen moments. (My favorite is an ad for Elizabeth Arden's "Green Tea Scent Spray," with the slogan "My spirit awakens to a splash of tea.") But beneath the amusing trappings is a Yankee philosophy that goes back 150 years and further, a thoroughly American outlook that fuses radical individualism with a practical embrace of the real world.
O is a cultural Trojan horse, and inside it are riding Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William James, and all the other romantic pragmatists, and they're grinning. As I read her magazine, I kept thinking of these long-dead people. Then I came upon Oprah's pullout cards, and there was a head shot of Emerson, with the quotation: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." He could have written it for O.
We do endless polls and studies trying to figure out what the people are thinking, what they care about and why, how they'll vote next fall. And all the while, we ignore -- or mock -- what may be the clearest window into the mind of America.
After all, it's just Oprah.
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William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com.
All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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