Solution, Or Problem?

Oprah, that is.

A book is summarized or reviewed or something. Sullivan got a good part, which we trimmed a bit & emphasized:

She consumes and markets luxury goods as expressions of identity and self-worth. She is compassionate and generous without challenging political, economic, and social structures. Hers is a “gospel of change,” but the change is entirely personal. Oprah never speaks the collective “we”; she is eternally focused on “I.” I believe. I consume.

Sounds like a problem to us. No problem is quoting some ten-dollar words ourself.

The O universe of products and experiences gathers a particular audience: female, middle class, inter-racial. Oprah confirms their bourgeois feminism, articulating a sisterly sense that their late-modern lives are over-busy, stressed by the demands of family and career, and filled with a sense of inadequacy. Oprah models two conjoined pathways to arrive at one’s integrated religious self: one is through the gathering of spiritual insights from diverse and potentially contradictory sources; the other is the consumption of aesthetically satisfying goods as a source of meaning and confirmation of self-worth. Oprah, as woman, media presence, and corporation, rolls these things up into herself.

However:

Curiously, Lofton tells us little about the consumers of the products and ideas that are swayed by the O. The cost of this disinterest is that it is easy to dismiss Oprah’s audience, their dissatisfactions and desires. From her description of the TV show and magazine, it is easy to see them only as white, bourgeois, vapid, and self-absorbed.

As an exemplar of self-absorbedly bourgeois white vapidity, we can't think of anything more deserving of dismissal, nor of a better way to dismiss something.

This may go too far, however:

Tradition and internal consistency matter little in the process of Oprahfication, “a dialogical idiom in which the interviewer restates what the subject has said in order to affirm its truth through a universal that she, Oprah, represents.”

We've no idea what any of this proves, indeed, we can barely tell what any of it means, beyond the belabored point that Amercians is dum.