Musings

I am on the verge of offending some people whom I consider friends. I don't mean to offend or hurt them. I am just fed up.
Fed up? Really? Why? I am fed up with Oprah. I find her narcissistic. There seems to be a cult of Oprah. It crosses the whole political, religious, sexual orientation spectrum, since I have friends of every stripe who find her fascinating, entertaining, educational, inspirational. I don't get it. I've seen her show, or rather, bits of it, and while I enjoyed the guests I was watching I didn't find her to be an incredible interviewer. I don't find her personally appealing. I have been switching back and forth since last night to check out her personal tv network and haven't seen anything yet that I couldn't see on A&E, TLC, Bravo, Lifetime, MSNBC Lockup or any other network I don't watch. Here's the deal for me: I don't talk about my religious beliefs, because they're mine, and I don't really care about yours, because they're personal to you. I don't want to know about other people's sex lives; if I wanted one, I'd have one, and if I wanted a partner, I'd look for one, but I don't care about other peoples' issues (unless it's my friend, that's a whole different thing). If I want to see hoarding, I'll just look at my spare room or garage or attic, and rather than sit and watch other people deal with their issues with hoarding I need to tackle my own cleaning (which I am). Maybe I am overly hostile about this, but I am inclined to think that if people spent the same amount of time living their own lives as they spend watching shows about other peoples' problems, their lives would be so much better. I watch a lot of television, I admit it. My preferences are, however, for fictional shows-cop shows, romantic comedies, old movies, science fiction. Not horror. Not personal non-fiction train-wreck shows. And to me, that is what Oprah's new network, much like her current talk show, is all about. A combination of celebrities (whose work appeals to me but not their personal lives) and non-celebrity train wrecks. I do like celebrities on talk shows when they are talking about their current projects or when they are just funny people, but I don't care about their lives too much.
Well, for what it's worth I've gotten that off my chest. Maybe at some point I'll find something on Oprah's new network that will appeal to me. But in the years she's had her magazine, nothing in it has compelled me to buy it or even read it, and I do buy women's magazines.

I don't really know why this stuff bugs me so much. Maybe because the whole idea of people turning to celebrities for their opinions and advice is so crazy to me. I will just use this one example, Glenn Beck. If you, for example, are a Baptist, then you wouldn't turn to a Mormon for religious guidance. In fact, you would slam the door on Mormon missionaries who came to your house. Yet millions of listeners think Glenn Beck, a Mormon convert, is brilliant. If he is that brilliant, those millions should be immediately searching out their nearest LDS church and signing up for conversion classes. Are they? If he is brilliant about politics then obviously his brilliance extends to his religious beliefs. So if you follow him politically because he is so brilliant, you should follow him in all things. But if he so disastrously wrong in his religious beliefs as you might assume, given that you aren't changing your religion to follow him, then why isn't he wrong politically? It is this cognitive dissonance that is so infuriating to me.

This example came to me because I just switched over to OWN and saw a bit with John Travolta. Scientology is a very odd religious belief system to most people, and most people don't follow John Travolta or Tom Cruise or any other celebrity into it, so that didn't fit into my analogy, but it triggered the whole thing. I don't watch Travolta's movies because I like his politics or his religious beliefs but because I enjoy his movies. So I don't have a huge desire to see him anywhere except in a movie. If he appears on a talk show I'm not tuning to the talk show to see him. On the other hand, I will watch George Clooney on some talk shows because he is very involved in some fine work in Africa, most especially the Sudan, and he has been working there for many years trying to improve those peoples' lives. That is important, and interesting to me. It doesn't hurt that he is easy to look at, but if he were just there talking about his current love life or his religion or his personal life at all, I wouldn't be watching. It is his work that draws and holds my interest. And he does a lot of that work quietly, only drawing attention to it in order to engage other people. I admire people who quietly do good works, donate money or otherwise try to help people who have not been as fortunate. What I find so unappealing about Oprah is that when she does good work it seems to be as much about promoting Oprah as it is about doing the good work.