Oprah Winfrey Helped Create Our American Fantasyland. By Kurt Andersen
Forty-eight hours ago,
after watching Oprah Winfrey give a terrific, rousing feminist speech on an
awards show, millions of Americans instantly, giddily decided that the ideal
2020 Democratic nominee had appeared. An extremely rich and famous and exciting
star and impresario—but one who seems intelligent and wise and kind, the
non–Bizarro World version of the sitting president.
Some wet-blanketing
followed immediately, among the best from the New York Times Magazine writer
Thomas Chatterton Williams in an op-ed headlined “Oprah,
Don’t Do It.” “It would be a devastating, self-inflicted wound for the
Democrats to settle for even benevolent mimicry of Mr. Trump’s hallucinatory
circus act,” he wrote. “Indeed, the magical thinking fueling the idea of Oprah
in 2020 is a worrisome sign about the state of the Democratic Party.”
Despite the “magical
thinking” reference, neither Williams nor other skeptics have seriously addressed
the big qualm I have about the prospect of a President Winfrey: Perhaps more
than any other single American, she is responsible for giving national
platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from
pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials,
paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more. The various fantasies she has
promoted on all her media platforms—her daily TV show with its 12 million
devoted viewers, her magazine, her website, her cable channel—aren’t as
dangerous as Donald Trump’s mainstreaming of false conspiracy theories, but for
three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon
reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.
Oprah went on the air nationally in the 1980s,
just as non-Christian faith healing and channeling the spirits of the dead and
“harmonic convergence” and alternative medicine and all the rest of the New Age
movement had scaled up. By the 1990s, there was a big, respectable, glamorous
New Age counter-establishment. Marianne Williamson, one of the new superstar New
Age preachers, popularized a “channeled” book of spiritual revelation, A Course
in Miracles: The author, a Columbia University psychology professor who was
anonymous until after her death in the 1980s, had claimed that its 1,333 pages
were dictated to her by Jesus. Her basic idea was that physical existence is a
collective illusion—”the dream.” Endorsed by Williamson, the book became a
gigantic best-seller.
Deepak Chopra had been a distinguished endocrinologist
before he quit regular medicine in his 30s to become the “physician to the
gods” in the Transcendental Meditation organization
and in 1989 hung out his own shingle as wise man, author, lecturer, and
marketer of dietary supplements… read more:
https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-helped-create-our-irrational-pseudoscientific-american-fantasyland.html