Gotham Diary:
To the Mast
23 May 2013
The problem with tying myself to the mast in order to get something done — in today’s case, what I can only call a major tune-up of the blue room, which is bordering on the bordel — is that I have to do the tying myself, which means that I can untie myself, something that I am very inclined to do now that I’ve read Chris Barsanti’s review of George Packer’s new book, TheUnwinding. I have a sudden craving to consume Packer’s criticism of perfectionists Alice Waters and Oprah Winfrey, which promises to be delicious.
But being instructed in Oprah’s magical thinking (vaccinations cause autism, positive thoughts lead to wealth, love, and success), and watching Oprah always doing more, owning more, not all of her viewers began to live their best life. They didn’t have nine houses, or maybe any house…they were not always attuned to their divine self; they were never all that they could be. And since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse.
Wouldn’t it be nice — much nicer than reshelving books — to tootle over to Crawford Doyle to pick up a copy of the book, and then to pay a final visit to the Impressionists show at the Museum? Yes, it would. But I’ll wait until tomorrow, and I’ll begin at the Museum and work my way eastwards, from the bookstore to the barber to Agata & Valentina, where I’ll buy the fixings for dinner. (Weather permitting, there will be six of us eating al fresco tomorrow night.)
Last night, after dinner, it was much cooler on the balcony than it was indoors — the rooms still held the day’s mugginess — and I sat in my sleepies running through Wikipedia entries about the Wittelsbachs of the 17th-century Palatinate. It was delightful. I wasn’t reading, exactly, but just boning up on dates and connections. I learned (and will not forget) that the lady who has entered history simply as “Madame” (Liselotte, duchesse d’Orléans) was the great-granddaughter of James I of England and the great-grandmother of Marie-Antoinette of France. I ought to have known it long ago. Que voulez-vous? There were no tablets to enable nocturnal study in the open air.
***
George Packer’s chilly assessment of Oprah Winfrey — I hope he doesn’t forget Martha Stewart — surprised me because I hadn’t seen Winfrey as an agent of the “personal responsibility” movement, but of course she is one. (In fact, I have never seen Oprah, or at least not her show.) The great lie about personal responsibility is that everyone has the freedom to be responsible. Most people do not. They are constrained by material shortages and indifferent educations, as well as by the lack of exceptional vigor and intelligence that enables highly unusual people like Winfrey to make the most, the very most, of any stray good luck. The lie is that everyone, working hard enough at it, could be Oprah. The personal responsibility movement is a campaign to absolve fortunate people from guilt for failing to take responsibility for the unfortunate — by denying the existence of fortune. (“Fortune” is made to mean nothing more than amassed wealth.)
The campaign is not entirely an expression of selfishness. There is a growing exasperation with government, which earlier generations had hoped to make capable of rationalizing charity by distributing goods and services evenly and equably. That hope suited simpler times, when there were far fewer goods and services, and a more austere, almost puritan notion of necessity prevailed. During the Depression, nobody was thought to need a radio, for example, in order to survive in the world. How did the bare necessities of life proliferate so quickly and so profusely after World War II? How did health care become so manifold and so complicated? We seem to have gone through a second industrial revolution, only without the industry. We might perhaps think of it as the personal revolution: within the past sixty years, expectations regarding personal consumption and well-being, as a matter of norm if not quite of right, have mushroomed, and we have yet to conceive of a program of public welfare capable of meeting them.
Hence: personal responsibility. It’s up to you, bub, to get your own flat-screen TV. Which doesn’t sound so bad, taken out of context. But the context is one of draining jobs and shuttered horizons. Hence Oprah Winfrey, who does not have the honesty to declare, as faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman so campily used to do, that she believes in miracles.