Of all the down-home bits of nitwit advice offered up by hillbilly philosophers, perhaps the most grating is the one that demands participation before it will allow criticism. Invariably delivered with a wry, slightly superior feyness that is intended to look like wisdom but comes off as constipation, it is the last line of defence for a certain kind of cultural collaborator, and it goes something like, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”
The trouble with home-made aphorisms, brewed in the mental moonshine stills of backwoods, is that they tend to overlook certain glaringly problematic applications of themselves. For instance, making out with your cousin behind the barn could very well be something that deserves to be tried before it is knocked; but what about genocide? Should Saddam Hussein’s legal team insist that the prosecution not knock mass murder until they have tried it themselves?
And then there is the additional problem of what happens when one does dabble with a view to later knocking. Consider the critic who injects heroin into his eyeball for the sake of objectivity: the only thing he ends up knocking are heads at ATMs as he funds his next research binge. And so it is with Oprah Winfrey.
To watch an episode of the doyen of emoto-slop is to be filled with despair for the collective mind of our tribe. Watch two, and you feel your soul growing a callus; which is perhaps why the third episode seems simply banal. But after the fourth, you begin to wonder why she broke up with Stedman Graham; and after nine you are gurgling into your tissues, your heart rent by the, you know, love.
In short, to try Oprah is to end up knocking nothing. The self-declared Zulu is the great critical anaesthetic of our times, numbing her legions with an endlessly escalating stream of superlatives. Every fourth episode contains the most amazing thing she has ever seen; every fifth do-gooder she wheels past her acolytes is her hero.
None of this would have mattered if she had just stayed at home in Chicago, and done what she does best, which is handing out hugs long ago rendered worthless by her self-generated emotional inflation. But Oprah had to go to Auschwitz.
Trudging through the snow with survivor Elie Wiesel, she asked pained rhetorical questions about the horror of it all, without ever leaving the centre of the screen. Look at all the shoes. Look at all the hair. Look at me… Later, back in the studio, she revealed that Wiesel had asked that they do it all in one take. That this should have been a noteworthy request, and not simply a fundamental assumption, suggests that she was quite prepared to do retakes in the death camp, to accommodate vanity not a dozen yards from the ovens.
But as every Midwesterner knows, there is always triumph after tragedy; and to lighten the mood, she hauled in a couple of survivors of the Rwandan genocide to chat about what it was like seeing their families chopped up. (Geez, it musta been awful.) And because she didn’t have an SUV to give two of the girls, she gave them their parents, whom the sisters hadn’t seen since 1994. There were tears, and cries of joy, and one felt very happy for the Rwandans; but one couldn’t help hating Oprah for keeping them apart just long enough to arrange that this emotional pornography play out in a studio. Perhaps the parents had arrived minutes earlier; perhaps it had been hours or days. But however long it was between when they landed in Chicago and when they embraced their children, it was too long because Oprah had ordained that they should wait. Every second that they weren’t together is a second gone and lost; and all for the benefit of the carrion-birds of American sentimentalism, that gigantic flock of stringy-necked soccer-moms who gorge daily on the carcass of decency, privacy and decorum.
Forty-eight hours later, Auschwitz is forgotten, and a married pair of celebrity country singers is strangling a sackful of cats and yodellers en route to the saccharine, lachrymose crescendo of an ode to Okey lust among the chickens.
“Y’all must have great sex,” says Oprah, before opening the floor to a discussion of what women call their vaginas. “Fa-jay-jay” and “Noo-noo” seem popular favourites.
“That was another Kleenex moment on Oprah,” said the South African sponsor. You can’t blame them for thinking it’s okay to call the gas chambers a “Kleenex moment”. They’ve just been watching Oprah for too long.