There you have it. Jimmy Carter was stating, unequivocally, that Palestinian terror is a deserved consequence of Israel’s actions, and would not stop unless and until Israel caves in to their demands. Absurd. Ridiculous. Stupid. And guaranteed to resonate with those who despise Israel. With those who would like to wipe Israel off the map.
He must have realized he’d gone too far. Carter told National Public Radio: “That was a terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.”
He continued: “The ‘when’ was obviously a crazy and stupid word. My publishers have been informed about that and have changed the sentence in all future editions of the book.”
“Crazy and stupid.” He said it. I didn’t. Sadly, the uproar did not have the intended effect. It just helped fuel Carter’s publicity machine.
To this day, Jimmy Carter has never fully explained how this distortion, in addition to so many other falsehoods and libels, made it into his book in the first place. I have come to a conclusion about Jimmy Carter, and his constant need to shock, then backtrack, then stand by so many offensive statements: He’ll say anything to prevent returning to the dust bin of history’s trash can, where he belongs.
14
The Color Green
OPRAH WINFREY
It’s amazing grace that brought me here. Amazing grace.
—Oprah Winfrey with presidential candidate Barack Obama in South Carolina, December 9, 2007
To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing
—Oprah defending author James Frey to Larry King, January 11, 2006
James Frey is here and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.
—Slamming author James Frey on The Oprah Winfrey Show, January 26, 2006
I understand why people think we’re gay. There isn’t a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it—how can you be this close without it being sexual?
—Oprah in O magazine on her relationship with best buddy Gayle King, August 2006
I have to admit, if Oprah were a man, I would marry her.
—Gayle King in O, August 2006
THE MOST POWERFUL WOMAN in America was not born rich or royal. She was never elected or appointed to office, nor did she inherit, marry or steal her incredible wealth, vast influence and international fame. This woman is capable of minting superstars, moving millions in merchandise and anointing political candidates with a wave of her hand and a nod of her head. When she opens her mouth, millions listen. She is Oprah Winfrey. She is our queen.
Perhaps I understate Oprah’s power. CNN and Time have labeled her arguably the most influential woman in the world. She accomplished this feat not through conventional means, such as running for politics or staging a bloody coup, but through today’s reigning pseudo-government: the media-infotainment-industrial complex. Oprah, a former Academy Award–nominated actress and TV reporter turned magazine publisher, hosts the highest-rated talk show in television history. Lest you think daytime TV is mainly for bored housewives and unemployed ex-cons, think again. Politicians and authors seek Oprah’s counsel. Starlets compete for her praise. A word of condemnation from Oprah’s mouth can cost your business millions. But winning Oprah’s seal of approval can more than make your career. It can make life worth living.
That a dirt-poor black girl from the deep South might rise to become America’s billionaire sweetheart (her net worth has been estimated at $2.5 billion, far more than any other African-American) is a head-scratcher. She is bright, but not brilliant. Educated. But not too. Her tastes are decidedly middle-brow. But Oprah’s struggles—particularly with her ever-fluctuating weight—have only made her more appealing to vast numbers of housewives and career women.
These days, giving the illusion of intimate confession is as good as the real thing, and Oprah has found common ground with all manner of people who believe she truly understands their complaints. These are people not accustomed to thinking too hard for themselves.
I wish I could maintain that Oprah is harmless. But some of the campaigns she has waged over the years, from defending an author who faked his life’s story, to championing Madonna’s putative purchase of an African baby, to campaigning for a hard leftist such as Barack Obama in his run for president of the United States, have left me gasping.
She was born Oprah Gail Winfrey in rural Mississippi on January 29, 1954, to a poor, unwed teen mother who worked as a housemaid. Or was she? In a 1991 interview, she said she was actually named “Orpah,” after the Biblical character, Ruth’s sister-in-law, but that her family and friends were incapable of pronouncing the name and it was changed to “Oprah.”
The story of her early life is Dickensian, punctuated by inspirational moments of genuine triumph. In fact, her story unspools like a made-for-TV movie. You can’t make this stuff up.
For Oprah’s first six years, she lived in rural poverty with her strict, devout grandmother, Hattie Mae, who taught young Oprah to read before the age of three and did not spare the switch. Oprah’s mother Vernita Lee then took her to live in a Milwaukee slum. Oprah has said she was raped by a cousin at the age of nine, and molested by an uncle and by a male friend of her mother’s. In other interviews, she’s said she was molested at four, which would have placed her at her grandmother’s house.
While under her mother’s tutelage, she repeatedly ran away and got into trouble. Vernita Lee sent her to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey, a coal miner and barber who was elected to the city council in Nashville, Tennessee. At age fourteen, Oprah gave birth to a son who died in infancy. She was devastated. Oprah never again gave birth to a child.
Vernon Winfrey was a strict man who made education a priority in his daughter’s life. While still in high school, Oprah took a job in radio, and enrolled in Tennessee State University at age seventeen. During her freshman year, she entered the beauty pageant circuit and was named Miss Black Nashville as well as Miss Tennessee. At nineteen, she became a local TV news co-anchor on WLAC-TV. In 1976, Oprah moved to Baltimore, where she co-anchored the six o’clock news on WJZ-TV. She then was offered the job as co-host of the local talk show, People Are Talking, and hosted Dialing for Dollars.
Oprah moved to Chicago in 1983 to host a morning talk show on WLS-TV, which quickly rose from the ratings cellar to beat the better established Donahue program. Oprah’s show went national, and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. Twenty years later, Oprah revealed that movie critic Roger Ebert, with whom she was involved, persuaded her to sign a syndication deal with King World, a move that was unusual for the time, but would make Oprah rich beyond her wildest imagination. Chicago would become the show’s permanent base, though Oprah would buy many houses. Eventually, her main place of residence became, not surprisingly, California.
It went so fast, and for a reason. Oprah gets roundly criticized for single-handedly lowering the IQ of popular television, dumbing down America even as she pretended to raise it up. It was Oprah who introduced the culture of confession, over-publicizing fad therapies and even unquestioningly giving air time to psychic phenomena and the occult. But the true hallmark of the Age of Oprah is her willingness to grant not just sympathy, but normalcy and understanding, to people who in earlier days would be shunned as freaks, desensitizing Americans to those who live outside societal norms. Oprah was praised for giving airtime to gay, bisexual and transgender individuals (did I leave anyone out?), but slammed by sociologist Vicki Abt, who co-wrote Coming After Oprah: Cultural Fallout in the Age of the TV Talk Show, who warned about blurring the lines between normal and deviant behavior.
For better or ill, she rapidly became a cultural force more influential than educational institutions, the family or even the church.
Time magazine said, “Few people would have bet on Oprah Winfrey’s swift rise to host one
of the most popular talk shows on TV. In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk. As interviewers go, she is no match for, say, Phil Donahue…What she lacks in journalistic toughness, she makes up for in plainspoken curiosity, robust humor, and above all, empathy. Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah’s eye…They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session.”
In 1985, she co-starred in Steven Spielberg’s film of Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for playing Sofia. (She lost to Anjelica Huston.)
Observing that Oprah had become increasingly vocal in her opposition to the war in Iraq, Ben Shapiro of Townhall.com wrote, “Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in America. She decides what makes the New York Times best-seller lists. Her touchy-feely style sucks in audiences at the rate of 14 million viewers per day. But Oprah is far more than a cultural force—she’s a dangerous political force as well, a woman with unpredictable and mercurial attitudes toward the major issues of the day.”
If you would doubt Oprah’s power, you’re probably not a beef producer. During a 1996 program about mad cow disease with Howard Lyman, Oprah spontaneously exclaimed, “It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!” Texas cattlemen were not amused, charging that the single comment cost their industry some $12 million. They sued Oprah for “false defamation of perishable food” and “business disparagement” in an Amarillo, Texas, court. The two-month case required Oprah to temporarily relocate her program to Texas. A jury found that Oprah and Lyman were not liable.
With her weight rising and falling—Oprah has blamed this alternately on her insecurity and on a thyroid condition—she once enjoyed a frisky love life, but has settled down for twenty-plus years with Stedman Graham, whom she has never married. They raise dogs. Though many have wondered why the pair never stepped down the aisle, it is Oprah’s relationship with her best friend, Gayle King, a former TV host and O magazine editor, with whom she has spoken on the phone four times a day for more than thirty years, that has raised the most eyebrows. Rumors that the two women are lesbians have persisted since 1997, when Oprah played the therapist on the episode of Ellen in which Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet. Oprah attempted to put the gay talk to rest in an O magazine piece that, frankly, only stoked the fire. “People think I’d be so ashamed of being gay that I wouldn’t admit it? Oh, please,” she said.
Honestly, just thinking about the man, woman or farm animal with whom Oprah spends her nights leaves me shrugging. I don’t care, and I don’t believe the majority of Americans do, either. What bothers me a whole heck of a lot more is how Oprah conducts herself with her clothes on. And as she’s risen to a level of credibility that’s beaten only by the pope—and I’m sure some would disagree with that—she’s made some astounding blunders.
* * *
Honestly, just thinking about the man, woman or farm animal with whom Oprah spends her nights leaves me shrugging.
* * *
The spokesmouth for Oprah’s production company, Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards) called this incident her “crash moment.” She meant that Oprah suffered an episode of fierce and unjust racism. But I have another description for the event that badly rattled Oprah’s cage, spurring her to stage a modern-day struggle to protect her civil rights, and those of all insanely rich celebutards. I call it Oprah’s “Do you know who I am?!” moment.
On the evening of June 14, 2005, Oprah and her entourage arrived fifteen minutes past closing time, at the lavishly expensive Hermes boutique in Paris, France, whose signature Birkin handbags start at around $6,000 and rise dizzyingly upward. Staff was in the store, preparing for a public-relations event that night. Oprah wanted inside (to buy a watch for Tina Turner). A clerk told her “Non.”
“Do you know who I am?!” Oprah asked.
Denied! A near international incident occurred, as Oprah suggested that if a white celebrity had stopped by after closing, they’d kiss her behind. “I know the difference between a store that is closed and a store that is closed to me,” said Oprah. Promises were made to TV viewers that Oprah would discuss on her program the awful racism she endured at a boutique whose name many women can’t even pronounce, let alone afford to buy a $320 silk pocket square. Even during regular store hours.
Soon, the Hermes CEO called Oprah’s people to explain, and invited the put-out star to come back and shop. I would venture that Oprah could stop in at midnight today and be kissed up to. She created such a stink, Hermes was bullied into issuing this public apology: “Hermes regrets not having been able to accommodate Ms. Winfrey and her team and to provide her with the service and care that Hermes strives to provide to each and every one of its customers worldwide. Hermes apologizes for any offense taken due to such circumstances.”
The following September, Hermes USA CEO Robert Chavez appeared on Oprah’s show, bowing and scraping and apologizing once again about “rude” treatment by an employee. We should all endure such crash moments.
The introduction of Oprah’s Book Club—which has done more than anything since the publication of the Bible to sell paper and ink—leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I appreciate that someone, particularly a major cultural force, encourages people to shut off the tube, pick up book, and read. On the other, I wonder about the whims and politics of being selected for plugging on Oprah’s show. The appearance of one’s book on the program routinely means a million additional sales and instant inclusion on best-seller lists. This process has even given rise to a scientific phenomenon—The Oprah Effect.
James Frey had no idea what he was getting into when his book, A Million Little Pieces was pushed by Oprah, causing it to rocket to the top of Amazon.com. The story of the author’s drug and alcohol addiction and criminality was sold as a memoir. That is, it was supposed to be the truth. In addition to other nail-biting passages, Frey describes being in recovery and undergoing two root canals with no anesthesia, which he withstood by squeezing a tennis ball until his nails cracked.
Of course, later he said he might have had one root canal. With novocaine. Whatever. Oprah was seen as plugging fiction as fact, encouraging Americans to lie, cheat and exaggerate for a buck. It got worse when she called into Larry King Live in early 2006 to defend Frey, saying the scandal was “much ado about nothing,” and suggesting that it was irrelevant if the book was true, as long as Frey’s memoir inspired people.
But the symphony of outrage grew only more deafening, and Frey was proclaimed a cynical phony. It was time for Oprah to turn. She lured Frey to her program, where she told him to his face that she felt duped. And she explained to her millions of viewers that Oprah Winfrey would never suggest that the truth doesn’t matter. Not mentioned was the fact that, had the book never been “discovered” by Oprah, few people would know or care.
In the end, A Million Little Pieces sold tons of copies, no doubt benefiting from the attention. An embarrassing episode. And the entire megillah proves one major truth about the publishing industry, addiction and Oprah Winfrey: Authors—do anything in your power, and I mean anything, to get mentioned on Oprah’s Book Club.
In what may be a case of silly excess—or no good deed goes unpunished—Oprah’s $40 million Leadership Academy for Girls near Johannesburg, South Africa, opened to great ridicule. The academy offered 152 impoverished students the opportunity to sleep on high thread-count sheets, to have the use of a beauty salon, indoor and outdoor theater, and attend yoga classes. Oprah was criticized at the school’s opening for not offering more modest facilities to educate a larger number of children. But she defended the star treatment as a way to effect long-term change in the troubled nation. In fall 2007, a matron was charged with sexually and physically abusing students, which led Oprah to fly to South Africa to help clean up the mess.
All of this makes me wonder�
��Is Oprah Winfrey a force for good in the world? Or ill? I chose the latter when I saw her cluck and cheer as she interviewed Madonna on her acquisition of an African baby. To whom else would Mrs. Ritchie speak?
A fuller discussion of the chick chat is found in the Madonna chapter of this book. I’ll say here that Oprah was in her mightiest “Bless you!” form when talking, via satellite, to the woman who earned the wrath of human rights groups for snatching a baby from his father and his village so she might accumulate a matched set of kids. Madonna didn’t need a lawyer, a priest or a spiritual adviser to get her out of trouble. She needed Oprah—a woman who wouldn’t know a tough question if it bit her on sensitive parts of the body. And Oprah approved. Discussion over.
Another human of whom Oprah approves is Barack Obama. As he became the first serious African-American candidate in history to seek the presidency Oprah didn’t just support him. She embraced him, idolized him and bestowed upon him the awesome power of Oprah. Who needs endorsements?
In December 2007, Oprah campaigned for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and at a rally in South Carolina, drawing an eye-popping crowd of 30,000, where people carried signs proclaiming, “Oprah for Vice President.” Obama was the headline. Oprah was the star.
According to the Politico.com website, Oprah touched not only on religious themes, but at times the South Carolina rally sounded downright messianic. It’s not enough, said Oprah, for politicians to tell the truth, “We need politicians who know how to be the truth.”
I wonder if, in this age of Oprahtainment, we need to elect leaders at all. All we need is to allow Oprah Winfrey to step up and tell us what to think, to feel, to buy and to say.
Celebutards Page 12
