(2008-07-14) Oprah And The Downfall Of American Society

Tom Jacobs: Oprah and the Downfall of American Society. In the fall of 2000, I was a member of a Tuesday-evening therapy group in Santa Barbara, Calif...can sometimes lead to self-absorption. That’s the central point of Janice Peck, a social critic who feels far too many people are sitting on yoga mats when they should be marching in picket lines.

Peck equates America’s “therapy culture” with increased levels of economic inequality and an unwillingness on the part of a self-centered populace to challenge the status quo.

And her symbol of this age of navel-gazing narcissism is Oprah Winfrey.

In her new book, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, Peck charts the rise of the wildly successful talk show host and entrepreneur and links it to the ascendance of an individualist ethos that is pitiless toward the poor. She argues these two trends are mutually reinforcing: Oprah’s gospel of spiritual strength and self-reliance made Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state more palatable.

She uses plenty of academic jargon and loads of footnotes, but there’s no spirit of intellectual inquiry to this book: The author is an outraged prosecutor making her case

Peck persistently pursues her perceived link, a quixotic quest that inevitably leads to overreaching

Peck is at her least persuasive when discussing the book club, a regular feature in which Winfrey designates a work of literary fiction as the book of the month and builds a program around discussing its contents

persuading thousands of daytime television viewers to read Cormac McCarthy isn’t good enough because they’re not appreciating his work in the correct way?

Too often, the book conveys the impression she arrived at her thesis and then began the search for evidence to back it up. At least that would explain why she so often seems to be doing intellectual contortions as she attempts to prove her thesis.

How is it that this woman whom Peck accuses of “depoliticizing” the nation got involved in the Obama campaign? That’s not a contradiction, Peck insists: Oprah endorsed her home-state senator because he represented, to her, “something beyond and above politics.”

To Peck, self-inquiry is essentially the same as self-involvement, and the quest to live up to your own potential inevitably leads to a willingness to stomp over anyone who gets in your way. I wonder what the professional nurse in my group would say to that.