Jay Kuten: Darker side to Oprah Winfrey's success

The US has had its share of catastrophes this year and last. Many of the causal factors are of human origin.
A prolonged jobless recovery from an economic near-meltdown, resulting in turn from regulatory deficiencies and human greed, continues to plague the country. Two ongoing wars exert their toll
. This year, major floods, the result of harsh winter snows and policies of the Army Corps of Engineers favouring development over preservation of natural wetland outlets, have ruined vast tracts of farmland and swept away towns. The horror of the tornadoes at Joplin, Missouri, is only beginning to sink in.
If these signs of Nature's displeasure and of human folly were not enough, along has come a seismic shift in American popular culture. After 25 years, Ophrah Winfrey has closed her TV talk show.
To give some scale to the importance of Oprah and her talk show, some political analysts have credited her early support of Obama with giving him the advantage of at least one million votes in the closely contested primary season. In turn, during the final countdown days to the ending of the Oprah show, the President of the US paid a visit of congratulation.
It's been two decades since an event in popular culture of similar significance. That was the closing of the Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. His Tonight Show had been on the air for 30 years and he retired to anonymity, but the two shows could not be more dissimilar.
Carson, a white comedian whose sense of humour originated in the heartland of Nebraska, took over the Tonight Show from Jack Paar, a quixotic, brilliant, moody person who, in a fit of pique, walked off his own show. Carson, with a self-deprecating quick wit, gradually developed into the nation's comic sandman, tucking folks in to sleep with laughter. It took awhile for me to appreciate Carson's genius. He was the greatest interviewer I've ever observed, bringing out the best in his guests even when, in some cases, they were determined to self-destruct. His was comedy without hostility, a rare talent.
Oprah was different. She was black. She was born in segregated Mississippi to a life of deep poverty, but one enriched by experience of the black churches and their traditions of redemptive belief in the meaning of suffering. Her show, which began in 1986, started as a conventional talk show of the day, with a somewhat lurid tabloid format of strange guests with stranger personal stories.
From that beginning, Oprah soon transformed her show, herself and the very medium. Her warm, solid, empathic personality soon found an outlet in coaxing her participant guests, ordinary folk, and then celebrities, to come and confess their darkest secrets.
Oprah was herself the embodiment of confession. She told viewers of her early hard life, her rape as a young girl by an older relative, her pregnancy at 14 and stillborn child, her continuing weight problems. Her role model encouraged others and soon the show became a soft-core version of a kind of therapy, albeit of the version of catharsis that was the currency of the original Freudian psychoanalysis - a view soon discredited in psychoanalysis - that revelation of the "hidden secret" was itself the therapy. Soon enough, confessional therapy became the mode and its ease and popularity made her show an outstanding success.
Oprah became the first black female billionaire.
To give her full credit, she used her position and money for significant philanthropy, providing schooling for children in Africa and providing a model of possible achievement for other underprivileged youngsters, male and female.
But like many a story of optimistic achievement, this one has the darker undercurrent of glorifying suffering. More than one astute critic has pointed out that, while the "therapy" may be superficial, the indulgence in suffering may have lingering effects, encouraging a revelling in suffering for its own sake, with little redemptive value in a predominantly secular culture.