Word: oprah
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...those vivid, strange electronic moral pageants, like the Thomas-Hill hearings, that are becoming a new American form. This is national theater: surreal, spontaneous, mixing off-hours pop culture with high political meanings, public behavior with private conscience, making history up with tabloids and television personalities like Oprah Winfrey. The trivial gets aggrandized, the biggest themes cheapened. America degenerates into a TV comedy -- and yet Americans end up thinking in new ways about some larger matters. The little television screen, the bright and flat and often moronic medium of these spectacles, works in strange disproportions of cause and effect: often...
...sacrament. The Archpriestess Barbara Walters comes with producer and camera crew to hear confession. She is empowered to grant absolution on behalf of the American people, playing first Inquisitor, then Fairy Godmother in the space of a segment. There are other clergy: the Archpriestess Diane Sawyer, the Archpriestess Oprah Winfrey. Credible Cardinal of High Policy and Emergency Confessions (" . . . better come clean, call Nightline") is Ted Koppel. Then there is His Grace Phil Donahue, the barking, mike-ready Bishop of Prurience, whose vestment for one of his shows was actually a dress...
...just breasts. Parts of one's face also need to be retouched. A plastic surgeon on the Oprah Winfrey show was extolling the virtues of his "quick 'n' easy" silicone-injected lips...
...America is only afternoon television, then people will care, in a slack- jawed way, whether Bill was unfaithful to Hillary with Gennifer. It is the kind of question asked on soap operas and on Oprah and Geraldo and Donahue. When the program ends, the audience will mute a commercial and scratch itself, glance out the window and see that reality still looks lousy. It will turn back to the television and click through the channels to find another hour of pointless junk...
STICKING TO NEW YEAR'S resolutions is no piece of cake. Before the Big Apple is even comfortably perched atop Times Square, criminals who had repented just moments earlier already begin snagging wallets, George Bush's lips go in reverse as taxes are raised and Oprah's stomach suddenly can't survive on liquids alone...