Sep 11 2007
Forget The Color Purple: Oprah’s all about the Green
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By Jason Miller
9/11/07
“The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”
Excellence indeed. Few would deny that Oprah Winfrey has achieved an extraordinary degree of THAT, at least by our society’s warped standards. Witty, articulate, attractive, beloved by tens of millions, and fabulously wealthy, she is the “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” queen of a vast media empire. Oprah is a living embodiment of the American Dream. What is perhaps most inspiring to her genuflecting disciples is that Oprah rose to her stratospheric position of wealth and influence from an impoverished start in a socioeconomic hierarchy still largely dominated by white males.
Oprah Winfrey ostensibly possesses the mythical Midas Touch, a generous spirit, deep spiritual wisdom, and, in the eyes of those blinded by their adoration, the credentials of a saint. Yet despite appearing destined for canonization, Oprah injects heavy doses of infectious pus into the already deeply abscessed wound of the American psyche.
How could anyone who’s noted for having said, “Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine,” have such a pernicious effect on our culture?
Let’s “count the ways…with a passion put to use.”
To truly understand the depth of the damage Oprah inflicts on our society, we need to step outside of our bourgeois indoctrination and see her for what she truly represents. Manifesting the Horatio Alger Myth on steroids, Oprah is a wet dream come true for our criminal class of ruling elites sometimes referred to as the plutocracy. She provides them with “irrefutable” and ubiquitous anecdotal evidence which “proves” the idiotic delusion that America is a meritocracy where everyone has a realistic chance of getting rich, if they just work hard enough. The reality is that the richest 20% of US Americans own over 80% of the wealth and the long-term trend has been toward an ever increasing concentration of treasure into a smaller number of strong-boxes(1).