Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Oprah Winfrey's Last Show: the End of a Dubious Legacy

Oprah Winfrey, media mogul form the Mudflats of Kusciuscko, Mississippi, is not just a celebrity, she's not just an icon, she is a revolutionary, a revolution, a movement and an era, a grand 25-year moment in Television History which is now drawing to a close.

She gave away so much. She advised woman, men, young and old, talented and just emerging. She interviewed the most protracted more than her fortune could account for. Cars, cruises, clothes, even careers.

She helped jumpstart the television reality TV self-help careers of two prominent doctors: Psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz, heart surgeon and medical guru on fitness, health and elaborate excursions into exciting one's love life.

It's in this final development where the real decline in our

Oprah Winfrey, for all her charities, charitable work, notoriety, influence in media and literary circles, what has she really accomplished? What is her pièce de résistance, the one work that she has done with long-term power.

Despite her vocal support for President Obama instead of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential Election, she did not solidify herself as a populist king-maker. Instead, she crested on the wave of a ground-swell, she topped a movement which was spreading across the nation, a vapid self-absorbed populist agenda, no less, which she merely proddd along, with all of its unhappy prejudices that have handicapped our curretn political discourse. She only helped the beguiling of voters, inducing them to judge people by the color of their skin, and not the content of their character. Dresses in the trappings of royalty, she mesmerized eclectic audiences without ministering the deeped needs brought out by the human condition.

For a woman who advocated the values of finding love and building a happy home life with a life-long mate, how come long-time boyfriend Stedman Graham has remained long-term Beau rather than her happily-wedded husband? Fear of commitment, unwillingness to cooperate in the simple bonds of matrimony, all of it casts a tragic shadow on a life lived so brilliantly in the public eye.

For a woman who has survived abuse, slander, scandal at home and abroad, still to command a multi-billion dollar empire, how come she seems so superficial, so inconsequential.

If nothing, she epitomizes the reality that this life, a run-wild rat-race of fame and finances, dilapidated into a vain vanity of vanities. Her questionable integrity in private betrays any public good which she did on behalf of millions around the world. She may have blessed untold masses, yet is she in turn blessed? Is hers a life that one could envy?

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