How Winfrey Elevates Lowbrow Tastes and Hurts Reading

Oprah’s Book Club, The New York Times wrote when the talk show queen revived it in 2005, is “a boon to authors and publishers.”

OBC has certainly been good for authors who lie and the greedy publishers who put out their books. Oprah’s first post-hiatus pick was James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” a memoir of substance abuse and rehab whose muscular Hemingway-lite style screamed inauthenticity. It also contained numerous fabrications.

Oprah wasn’t alone; Frey’s lies fooled many stalwarts in America’s state-controlled media. “As Frey takes pains to make clear, he was a particularly hard case–an omnivorous drinker, crack smoker and occasional drug dealer who was wanted in three states on outstanding charges,” wrote a Times reviewer who recommended the book. Neither Oprah’s staff nor the Times bothered to check whether criminal records verified his “harrowing” account. (They didn’t.)

Thanks to its placement on Oprah’s Book Club “Pieces” spent 15 weeks as a number one bestseller and generated at least $2.3 million in sales. When Oprah invited Frey back on the show to dress him down for lying, people winced at Frey’s humiliation. I hope he thanked her; it generated more sales.

Oprah narrowly dodged a bullet with another of her picks, the maudlin 1997 Holocaust memoir “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” by Misha Defonseca. This purported tale of a young Jewish girl who travels through Europe in search of her parents before being adopted by a pack of wolves, à la Romulus and Remus (!), turned out to be less than authentic. Quelle surprise. For one thing, “Misha”‘s real name was Monique de Wael. For another, she was Catholic, not Jewish. And she never left home. As for the wolves…well, you can guess how truthful that part was. In March 2008 Defonseca (née de Wael) admitted “is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving.”
Fortunately for Oprah, the truth came out before the show she taped urging her audience to buy “Misha” was released.

“The single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air,” Oprah called a Holocaust-era romance (notice a trend?) between Herman Rosenblat and his wife Roma. The couple’s 1996 appearance on her show scored them deals for two books–leading to Oprah’s latest embarrassment. Herman’s story that his future wife had saved his life by tossing apples over a fence at Buchenwald were belied by historical accounts of the camp’s layout.

Before the truth caught up with them, the Rosenblats’ Oprah imprimatur also secured them a $25 million movie deal. The film is in production at this writing.
Oprah claims she was duped by greedy, lazy publishers. Yet her website still recommends the fake books by Frey and the Rosenblats. Even so, the problem isn’t Oprah’s credulousness. It’s that she has atrocious taste. That, and a platform for promoting her bad taste.

Books picked by Oprah’s Book Club sell in the millions. Once such title was Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road,” a plodding and vacuous depiction of phony connectivity between father and son after something terrible–we never learn what–has happened. (“The Man” and “The Boy,” he calls them. This passes for clever.) Like many of Oprah’s picks, and like many of the titles promoted such influential mainstream venues as The New York Times Book Review, it’s a book written in the form of a good book–spare prose, brooding tone, and who doesn’t love a good post-whatever societal meltdown tale?–that is not actually good.

An excerpt:

“Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we’re still going south.
Yes.
So we’ll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?”

Sure, it’s okay. But only if you blow your brains out first. This tendentious crap won the friggin’ Pulitzer friggin’ Prize. It’s going to be a movie. McCarthy is gonna make millions. And he sucks.

To which one might ask: So what?

Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin weighed in when the Frey scandal broke. “Whatever [Frey’s] intent, ‘A Million Little Pieces’ clearly moved many readers—Oprah included—or it wouldn’t have been as successful as it was,” he wrote. “Why did it elicit such an emotional response, and is that response rendered invalid if its source is revealed to be a lie?”

Yes. It is. Of course. Because the readers were fools to have fallen for such tripe in the first place. First of all, because it was obviously untrue and second, because the writing was so bad. The problem isn’t bad and dishonest writers. They can’t help themselves. The problem is that mainstream American culture is gullible, sentimental, and dumb.

No is more blameworthy for Americans’ stupidity than publishers and book reviewers who act as taste-makers. As in all creative pursuits, publishing exposure is a zero-sum game. Rising tides don’t lift all boats; anyway, they’re more like thrones than tides. A few titles suck the air out of the room as the rest wither and die due to lack of attention.

Each decision to review a bad book results in a better book going unreviewed, unnoticed, and its author unremunerated–and thus less likely to keep publishing. Each prize committee’s decision to grant an award to a bad book takes away praise that might otherwise have drawn acclaim and sales to a good one. When bad books do well, authors study what works in the marketplace and copy the formula–resulting in more bad books.

Readers who rely on popular hype to choose books often come away disappointed. A few may decide to deep deeper, but most won’t. Burned readers become non-readers.
A few years ago, I read Robert Fisk’s magesterial “The Great War for Civilisation–The Conquest of the Middle East,” in which the legendary war correspondent used a “Pulp Fiction”-like wrap-around structure to tie together personal and sweeping historical narratives of the West’s 20th century relationship with the Middle East to staggering effect. It’s a 1136-page monster, yet I savored every sentence.

Everyone I know who has read it came away with the same impression. Yet “The Great War” never made the bestsellers list. It languishes at #43,498 on Amazon, the victim of book reviewers and media mavens who chose to ignore it in favor of dull, sentimental crap, some of which isn’t even true. In case you were wondering, “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World” is #2 on The New York Times bestsellers list (non-fiction category, natch).

Imagine what the book world would look like if books like Fisk’s tome or my current favorite, George C. Herring’s monumental “From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776,” were an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Of course, that will never happen. Which is why, if Oprah truly cares about books, she’ll stop trusting herself and her tastes, and shut down her stupid book club.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It.

What’s the difference between you and a corpse? You both contain the same organs, the same fluids–all the same stuff. Inside you, stuff moves around. That’s the difference between life and death.

What’s the difference between economic boom and bust? Again: movement. The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value. But money, the lifeblood of any economy, has stopped moving around.

Wealth is still here. But the economy has flat-lined.

We know what caused the problem–the double bursting of the dot-com and housing bubbles, coupled with government regulators who took the last three decades off from work and financial analysts who said the old rules no longer applied. (The old rules always apply.) The underlying meta causes of the Crash of ’08 were an unholy trinity of stagnating wages, easy credit and brilliantly executed consumer propaganda that convinced people they were lame unless they bought all the latest stuff. But that’s a discussion for another time. This week, let’s think about how to escape the deflationary spiral that will reduce the world’s richest nation to penury unless something is done soon.

The Fed, having reduced interest rates to zero, is out of ammo. Banks are using the $700 billion bailout to buy each other up, enriching only themselves and a few hundred investment bankers. (In all fairness, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told them to do just that.)

President-Elect Obama’s plan blends George W. Bush and FDR’s greatest hits: a symbolic Bush-style tax cut of $500 per person ($1,000 per couple) and a $850 billion infrastructure construction bonanza reminiscent of the WPA projects of the 1930s. Obama’s tax cut won’t stimulate the economy; they never do. Due to the “multiplier effect,” Obama’s economists predict that his public works projects will create 3.2 million new jobs by the first quarter of 2011. “Peter Morici, economist at the University of Maryland, projects that $100 spent on a bridge or school boosts economic activity by about $200,” reports the Associated Press. (That doesn’t count the benefit of improving Americans’ longer-term productivity. For instance, better roads could reduce commuting times or help get goods to customers more efficiently.)”

A public works program is a good idea. But Obama’s plan won’t be enough to put a dent in the skyrocketing unemployment rate. 3.2 million jobs would be barely enough to replace six months worth of job losses at current rates. And most analysts think those rates will rise. With the federal budget continuing to sink $9 billion a month into the fiscal sinkhole of Iraq, there isn’t much cash to make the plan bigger.

“With negative or low economic growth projected well into the future, the economy needs a long-term fix,” says Stanford economist John Taylor, who worked in Bush’s Treasury Department. Definitely. But what?

Unless something big happens (like every pundit, I should predicate every prognostication with the acronym USH for “unless something happens”), the depression will deepen quickly. Our economy is two-thirds dependent on consumer spending, but consumers are stone cold broke. Decades of attacks on labor and free trade agreements caused wages to stagnate as inflation raged, so Americans have no savings to draw upon. Credit is no longer available as a back-up.

The American consumer has left the building.

Demand will keep shrinking, forcing companies to lay more people off, which will accelerate the shrinkage of their customer bases. Prices will drop to chase the few dollars left in the economy, triggering deflation. It’s already begun: Prices fell 1.7 percent in November (20 percent on an annualized basis). Debtors will try to pay off inflated credit card bills and mortgages with deflated money. They will fail. Misery will spread.

What happens next, I think, is that people will do what large numbers of people always do when they need money and food but can’t find a job. They will start to think about the rich, who still have all the wealth they accumulated while money was still circulating. And they will take it from them. It might be the easy way, through liberal-style income redistribution. Or it might be the hard way. Either way, it goes against the laws of nature to expect starving people to allow a few individuals to sit on vast aggregations of wealth.

When I was young, I assumed that revolutions resulted from ideology, because idealists wanted a fairer world. Now, as we stare down the barrel of economic apocalypse, I realize that they’re carried out by desperate people who have nothing to lose, in Marx’s words, and everything to gain. They take stuff from the rich and write the ideological tracts after the fact.

With the economic distress we’re likely to see in the coming year or two or three, revolution will become increasingly likely unless money starts coursing through the nation’s economic veins, and soon. Will it be a soft revolution of government-mandated wealth distribution through radical changes in the tax structure and the construction of a European-style safety net, as master reformer FDR presided over when he saved capitalism from itself? Or will the coming revolution be something harder and bloodier, like the socioeconomic collapse that destroyed Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union? To a great extent, what happens next will depend on how Barack Obama proceeds in his first weeks as president.

(Ted Rall is the author of the seminal Generation X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids” and a former loan officer for The Industrial Bank of Japan. He draws cartoons and writes columns for Universal Press Syndicate.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL