I lost all respect for Oprah during her promotion of The Secret. My personal issue was that my mom was then fighting breast cancer (second occurrence) and I was and am offended by a theory that she “attracted” cancer to herself or could have “thought” herself well. AND – most offensive – that people should avoid her (avoid all sick people, actually) in order to not catch her “negative energy” by proximity.
Mom thought herself well, all right; by maintaining a positive attitude and refusing to be beaten by surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. But seeing Oprah sing the praises of a theory that I found not just ridiculous but actively harmful and meanspirited, made me really dislike her. Oprah, that is; I’m still a big fan of Mom.
I think we talked about this before. I’m a huge believer in the law of attraction, but within very defined limits. Does that book (or Oprah) actually say it cures cancer?
I experienced this in reverse. Found a book at Barnes & Noble that I thought sounded good. On my way to the checkout, I noticed that sticker on the front that said it was Oprah’s Book Club pick. I put it back.
For some of us, that’s just another reason to hold her in contempt, since it fits perfectly into her pattern of: Let’s take a charming notion without substance and elevate it to the masses because we want the world to work this way. Many of us find Obama to the The Secret of representative democracy.
The linked article seems to indicate that the book does. Scroll down to the fourth paragraph from the end, which mentions a testimony in the book from a woman who claims to have cured her own breast cancer, no chemo or radiation, via positive thinking using their method. To Oprah’s credit, the next paragraph lists her reaction to one of her viewers writing her about stopping conventional cancer treatments, and how horrified she was. However, the article writer points out that just weeks earlier she showed effusive praise and now all of a sudden it’s merely “a tool” and not the answer to all problems.
Seriously? This attitude kind of seems snotty to me. She has picked some pretty good books in the past, and it’s not like the authors can help being picked. If she picked Shakespeare, would that suddenly become unappealing?
I wonder how Harpo found time to appear with the Three Stooges. I thought the Marx Brothers kept him pretty busy.
After the whole Secret thing there was a lot of attention paid to Oprah’s advocacy of nice-sounding feel-good nonsense. It doesn’t seem to have slowed her down.
Gracie Allen was never even sure what year she was born in. Her birth certificate was destroyed (along with most other public records) in the San Francisco earthquake.
