I Should Have Known

A couple of my wicked smart professor friends alerted me to an article which describes how the entire Eat, Pray, Love phenom/debacle is all thanks to Oprah. Apparently, she told everyone how amazing the book was and then, of course, millions and millions of people went out and bought it. What a menace! The article says some really smart things about how Oprah's brand of self fulfillment and personal happiness is inextricable tied to consumerism. However, the reason that Oprah really grinds my gears are not nearly as nuanced or academic. Here are my problems with the big O:

1. I hate her book club. Will you please stop trying to tell me what to read? I don't remember asking you. To make matters worse sometimes when I go to buy a book I want to read [ie, The Poisonwood Bible which is fantastic] I get all bummed out because it has the Oprah sticker on it. Not the kind that I can peel off with my fingernail, but the kind that has actually been printed on the cover. So, now it looks like I just rocked up to Barnes and Noble like a super independent thinker and thought: Wait a minute, what does Oprah want me to read???

2. She always looks sooooo smug. I get it. She was born super poor and now she's a billionaire and rules the world. Alright already! Can we give this eternal big headedness a rest? I mean, I never see Richard Branson looking all full of himself. He just grins sheepishly and then goes bungy jumping or something. This is probably why he runs an airline staffed with hot gay dudes and purple lights and Oprah is in charge of getting people to read hokey self help books.

3. Doctor Phil.

4. I don't like how she tricked James Frey into being on her show so she could lecture him about how she felt lied to. First of all, didn't the man try to shop his books as fiction in the first place but the publishers decided to market them as memoirs because they outsell fiction by about 10 to 1. Shouldn't she really have had his publisher's marketing team on the show? And is there really anything so terrible about tricking people into reading?

5. I flipped on her show one day last year and it was one of her give away days when all members of the audience get to take home a prize. On this day, the audience members discovered they were getting a new washer and dryer. What I saw next was gross. I saw a room full of suburban housewives crying, shaking, and stomping their feet. Over a new washer and dryer. I could have understood if they were housewives from the Appalachian Mountains, but something tells me that these ladies were not pulling out a bucket and a scrub brush every time there was some laundry to do at home. It was a pretty disgusting example of materialism in our nation [which I'm pretty sure the ladies at Bitch magazine said with a bit more eloquence than myself in their article about Oprah and Eat, Pray, Love]. The whole thing made me wish I was Canadian.