O No

My wife has subscribed not just to a magazine, or any magazine, but to O magazine, whose back issues have been piling up in the guest bathroom. Of the many things she gets and I don't, O is one of the most nagging. 


It seems to me that you ought to be able to tackle the following how-to's in one article, or at least one issue: How to Inspire the Best in You, How to Live Your Best Life, How Doing What You Love Can Make You Rich, How to Hear the Hard Things, How to Silence Your Inner Critic, How to Let Yourself Get What You Want, How to Improve Your Marriage without Talking About it, How to Tap into Your Inner Power,  How to Tap into What Really Motivates You, How to Become the Person You Were Meant to Be, How to Be a Star at Work, How to Learn to Speak Your Mind, How to Find Your True Calling, How to Know if You're Happy, How to Find Out How Much Money Is Enough, How to Know if Your Marriage Is Good Enough, How to Know When to Hold a Grudge, How to Know What It Takes to Make You Happy, How to Change Your Partner When You Change Yourself, and How to Learn the Hidden Benefits of Anger, Cursing and Negativity. 


Well, How to Learn the Hidden Benefits of Anger, Cursing and Negativity might require several issues. But it seems to me that the rest of these topics could be cumulatively addressed in no more than, say, four or five thousand words. And yet in issue after eerily humorless issue, Oprah parses them out a few at a time. 


She means to inspire her readership by her own extraordinary example, and there's no denying her accomplishments and her philanthropy (unless, of course, you share my father's view that philanthropy begins where you give away more than you can afford). And yet O feeds into our nationally crippling case of plutophilia. (Her readers were recently encouraged, for instance, to photographically tour Oprah's Hawaiian mansion, which she has designed as a "country farmhouse.") The worship of wealth and power, celebrity and well-heeled peachiness afflicts so many Americans who should, by rights, be mad as hell, but have been enticed into settling for the remotest prospect of winning the lottery or attending an Oprah taping and finding plane tickets under their seats.   


I know there are those who live and breathe uplifting self help like Oprah's. My wife and daughter spent a Saturday helping a friend move. My daughter was assigned the task of packing the friend's library, which consisted almost exclusively of self-help how-to's and inspirational anthologies. So she neatly packed up book after book about healing and growing and learning and coaching and empowering and spirituality and hormones and life stages and weight and addiction and depression and exercise and trauma and on and on, until she found a book that was titled along the lines of How to Beat Your Addiction to Self-Help Books, whereupon my daughter went on strike. 


I suppose I shouldn't be scornful, for there are lots of things I don't know how to do, like saving the environment in seven easy steps, or eating "fabulous on $40 a Week." And I won't deny that my self needs help. 


The chronic need for guidance and reassurance that O capitalizes on so profitably reminds me of the mother who was asked how often she thought you should tell your children that you love them. 


"Every night," she said, "and every morning, and every afternoon, and if you do that every day of every month of every year, and tell them they are the smartest, funniest, prettiest children in the whole wide world, they just might make it through first grade."