Some people autonomically loathe mainstream arts and politics and consciousness and culture: ask yourself, for example, how Johnny Rotten felt about Fleetwood Mac in 1978. But others autonomically approve of mainstream figures and ideas, just by virtue of the fact that they’re mainstream. They might be the sort of people who regarded Hillary Clinton as "the most qualified person ever to run for president" and also the least offensive, and who thought her defeat was impossible. They might even compare the sales figures of the Sex Pistols and Fleetwood Mac and conclude that Fleetwood Mac was the more important band.
"Mainstream people" tend to pine for the day when there were at most three sources of television news, all saying the same sentences in the same order. They pine for the days when there were two political parties with slightly-contrasting and extremely mainstream positions.
By the way, Bill and Hillary Clinton's theme song in 1992 was Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." It is a very, very inoffensive song, difficult (though possible) to really hate. That's been the Democrats' approach to candidate selection for decades now: find the least interesting candidate, the least jagged, the least distinctive: a candidate with no non-smooth edges. Make a political pop music that everyone understands and will buy; find the candidate we can promote like Pepsi: a sweet item that everyone will purchase and that causes diseases such as obesity, for which we can market cures.
Speaking of which. "This feels both sacrilegious and scary, but I have a bone to pick with Oprah Winfrey," said the headline over a Guardian column by Emma Brockes last week. I was hoping for something else, but the column was just what it appeared to be: a slightly-disappointed expression of the mainstream.
"It’s Oprah, for god sake," wrote Brockes, somehow, "the woman we grew up adoring, who burst through so many ceilings, who Tina Fey correctly cast as a god-like figure in that episode of 30 Rock (where her character, Liz Lemon, took too many pills, got on a flight, and hallucinated that Oprah was sitting next to her in club class). In that scene, Fey did what we would all do if encountering Oprah while our inhibitions were lowered: she sniffed Oprah’s hair, told her she loved her and went on a deranged monologue that included the phrases 'I eat emotionally' and 'I saw your show about following your fear and it inspired me to wear shorts to work'."
It would be sacrilegious and scary in a similar way to criticize Tom Cruise. Wait, what? But everybody loves Tom Cruise. I'd just like to tell him that I don't eat emotionally enough while he jumps out of a plane.
As she explores Oprah's former rival talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell's criticism of Oprah for attending the Bezos wedding in Venice, Brockes keeps pouring out remarks like this: "And there, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Gayle King, who walked several paces behind her as is proper, was Oprah Winfrey." I recall the era when, if various news organizations couldn’t get comments on random stories from Oprah, they would call Gayle King and ask her what Oprah would say about X.
I find this puzzling. The main thing I know about Oprah is that she tortured a woman I’d marry soon after. Marion Winik, the memoirist, had been married to a gay man, Tony, who died of AIDS. In the late-1990s she was promoting her memoir about this shattering experience, First Comes Love, and no one promoted books better than Oprah, who was completely enamored of fake memoirist James Frey, until she wasn't anymore. Oprah, rather than praise or explore the book, which was a memoir of something that really happened, ambushed her by bringing out a man who had an affair with her husband when they were married. Also, by all reports Oprah smiled as the cameras rolled and then when they stopped was yelling "Where's my fucking tea?"
But she inspired Fey and Brockes to wear shorts, perhaps the most controversial decision either ever reached, their moment of deep transgression.
At any rate, Oprah's talk show was a talk show, not an audience with the Queen of the Gods. And speaking of emotional eating, Oprah Winfrey ballooned and deflated, ballooned and deflated, leading America on a yo-yo diet that lasted decades, always promoting another program or gimmick, and always with a self-esteem sermon. None of what she promoted did any good, even for herself, until the GLP-1 class of receptor agonists hit the market. Recently, she’s apologized "for her role in promoting diet culture." But without the drugs, she'd just be going right on.
Oprah taught that self-esteem makes you skinny and happy and free and powerful. One thing about this teaching: it’s too empty even to be superficial. It’s meaningless, though Hillary ran on it. You ought to esteem yourself just to the extent that you deserve esteem, but Oprah just wanted to jack up your ego for a few seconds so she could keep you strung up on her yo-yo. She thought self-esteem enhancement was the key to gender equality, the key to education, the meaning of human life, and above all the key to weight loss. It's Dale Carnegie but with, if possible, even fewer intellectual underpinnings. Eventually, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden would run for president on the self-esteem enhancement platform. There just wasn't anything there.
People like that made a politics that sounded like psychotherapy of the intellectually weakest and least effective variety. But politics isn’t therapy. Neither is art. Joe Biden just kept saying "I know we are better than that" or "This is not who we are." But that has nothing to do with anything; stop buttering people up and start trying to say the truth, is my advice to you non-entities.
Oprah's spiritual underpinnings, such as they ever were, were oriented around “health,” and she bequeathed unto us Drs. Phil and Oz. Whether those dudes are swinging left or right this week, they’re also this week failing to cure America, just as they have done every day since 1992 or whatever it may be.
The main thing I want to note, however, is the contrast between people who find the mainstream wholesome and attractive and those who find it boring and full of happy lies, predictable personalities, and conventional arts. Perhaps, ultimately, to have a culture we need both: the edgy stuff, and the Oprah/Hillary stuff that has no edges whatsoever. Maybe we need both the Ramones and the Eagles. If I were trying to give an argument for the validity of Oprah Winfrey, or Elton John, it’d be that you can't generate something interesting unless you're willing to be bored silly. From my angle, the best argument for Elton John is that you can't get to the Ramones without him.
On the other hand, I think Oprah culture directly caused the manosphere and Donald Trump. I'd like to stop the yo-yo and make it possible for anyone to be edgy or mainstream at any moment. But for that, we'll have to wait until Oprah’s over.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell