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Pastimes : Where the GIT's are going -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (139524)	4/6/2007 5:14:11 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 225578

Re Oprah....Here's something that shows a little of several sides of the issue... O, how I Love You, Oprah: Oprah's politics are sometimes O-dious. Still, Charlotte Allen finds her A-O-kay Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2002 by Charlotte Allen findarticles.com SURE, YOU CAN get really tired of Oprah Winfrey fast. There's the saturation factor: the TV show five times a week (ten if you count the late-night reprise), with Oprah always front and center; the appalling movies (did anyone actually see Beloved?); the me-magazine, O, always with Oprah on the cover and always at the checkout stand in every supermarket in America; and finally, the website, titled Oprah.com (what else?), which reprises both 'zine and show. So: "O" is for omnipresence--Oprah's. "O" is also for oval, her perfect, polished oval of a face framed by another oval, the hard, wide, high helmet of jet-black hair that adds height and formidability, for Oprah is short, and also balance against her pillow-shaped figure, for "O" is also for overweight. Her battles against food and fat are famous, and check her clothes: always a jacket or an overblouse or a vest or a shawl to cover, or at least distract, from the mighty hips and thighs, because Oprah always loses her weight battles over the long run. "O" is also for orthodontia and opalescence, because some dentist has worked long and hard to create that bright, dentures-in-a-glass smile of which every pearly tooth is visible and which Oprah is never without--always the same smile, all thirty-two snowy teeth framed by a lipstick Cupid's bow--wherever a camera is looking. And "O" is for--uh oh--Oxygen Media, the little-watched, fast-tanking cable network for women that Oprah helped launch two years ago to the tune of millions of dollars likely never to be seen again. But that's chump-change. Oprah makes $150 million a year from her other ventures, according to Forbes magazine, and her media empire grosses a cool $1 billion, with the sixteen-year-old Oprah Winfrey Show as its flagship with 22 million viewers. Yes, you can get sick of Oprah. You can also wish that she could be just a little less predictably liberal in politics. 'Why the relentless drumbeat for those tiresome Doublemint Twins of Anger Feminism: Gloria Steinem and Eve ("Vagina") Ensler? Why the interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg but not Sandra Day O'Connor? And Oprah's religion! She was reared by a devoutly Christian grandmother, but her faith nowadays seems to be in a divinity called "your spirit" (it's inside you, but its also a page on Oprah's website). Her magazine touts such wordy insta-gurus as author Gary Zukav ("Communicating with your own soul gives you a glimpse of the most fulfilled, wise, compassionate, and intelligent person that you might become"), now a regular on her television show, and don Miguel Ruiz, a poor man's Carlos Castaneda and mentor of comediennewannabe Ellen DeGeneres. Ruiz invokes what he calls "Toltec teaching" to urge that we start "refusing to buy into everything we've been taught about who we are." (Don't know who t he Toltecs were? According to an article about the don in the October 2001 issue of 0, they were "artists and spiritual seekers" in Mexico who "were forced to hide their ancestral wisdom from European conquerors." And you thought those were the Aztecs!)