Dear Oprah, please shut up about your fucking private jet

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Oprah, astonishingly tone-deaf, to Duke's graduating class:

It's great to have a nice home. It's great to have nice homes! It's great to have a nice home that just escaped the fire in Santa Barbara. It's great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn't great is lying to you.

Yeah, okay, sure. I've enjoyed some luxuries, too -- nice homes, nice cars, nice restaurants, foreign travel, and the like (if not quite on Oprah's scale) -- and, yes, they can be great. But, seriously, this is what she says during this time of economic crisis? That's it's great to have a private jet? Well, isn't it also great to be able to put food on the table, pay your bills, and send your kids to college?

Given how many people are losing their jobs, not to mention their "wealth," one would expect a mega-celebrity who dabbles daily in stories of suffering to show a bit more, er, sensitivity. Sure, she talked about helping people, but, for her, helping others is really about achieving a greater degree of success for yourself. Like everything else about the self-obsessed Oprah, in other words, her philanthropy is fundamentally selfish. It's all about her: I help other people; therefore, I am a good and successful and deserving person, and so I can fly around in my private jet with a clear conscience.

Well, isn't that fucking awesome?

Robert Frank of the WSJ, to whom I link above, praises Oprah, as you might expect, for being so honest. Well, it was honesty, I suppose, but it wasn't just the honesty of the shameless rich (Dennis Kozlowski comes to mind), it was the honesty of the self-absorbed egotist, the honesty of the self-deifier.

And what she reveals here is that she cares primarily about herself, not those she claims to help, or want to help. And yet why do so many people like her and adore her? Why is she so popular? Perhaps because she plays the part of the daytime cult of personality so well, because she oozes caring even as, beneath that veneer, she cares only about herself -- and her homes, and her jet, and everything else she has surrounded herself with, everything else she has bought. Her adorers buy the books she recommends and the various products she hocks (for she is all about the shameless product placement) and hang on her every word. They want to be like her, to be similarly good and successful and deserving, and to have the homes and the jet, for she is the embodiment of their dream, of the American Dream generally, conspicuous consumption with a conscience, happiness as material excess, the salvation of the soul reflected in wealth too vast to imagine.

The Gospel of Oprah is about the material and spiritual salvation of Oprah. It's all so thoroughly disgusting at this time of economic crisis, with so many people losing their homes and their jobs, their own dreams shattered, but it isn't any better even when things are going well. I'm sure it's great, in a way, to have a private jet, and to be able to afford to do whatever the hell you want whenever the hell you want, not to mention to have a massive ego trip of a TV show (where she can show off just how good and successful and deserving she is), but Oprah can take hers and shove it up her me-first righteousness.