"Mammon is Queen"

Okay, like some other poseur faux-intellectual-walking-stereotype-of-the-left snobs you may know, I rarely watch network television. However, during a recent visit with my mother and sister in North Carolina, I found myself parked in front of an idiot box pretty much constantly, as it seemed to be the easiest way to avoid the pitfall of conversing with my relations. Yeah, I know -- "ask me about my dysfunctional family". Or better yet, don't.

At any rate, by the insistence of my sister and my own tendency toward cowardly avoidance of conflict, I sat through a portion of Oprah that may as well have been an infomercial for the latest self-help craze known as "The Secret". I choked down about ten minutes of bromidic viewer testimony and smugly authoritative commentary from Oprah's "expert panel" before (by way of preventing myself from asphyxiating on my own righteous indignation) needing to leave the room.

My husband -- who clearly has a higher outrage threshold than I, or at least is a lot more mean-spirited -- viewed the entire show, and highlighted it for me afterwards despite my clapping my hands over my ears and rolling around on the floor screaming "NONONONONONONO!!". And because I think he truly enjoys seeing me get pissed off (so long as it's not at him), he recently forwarded this Slate.com piece to me (quoted below). Which, in turn, I am now compelled to share with the three individuals who might actually read this blog. Vive le spleen!

"And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she's helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're "blocking it with their thoughts." I'm already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as "The Secret" does, that they "create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day," a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I'm sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen."

~Peter Birkenhead