We would never -- COULD never -- watch, but as with Arsenio Hall, we have had banality thrust upon us. Oprah's tarnished golden boy [must not be real gold, as real gold doesn't tarnish] James Frey in happier days opposite the Reader of the Free World.
"Maybe the power of personal opinion and personal experience are becoming more valued than facts. As Oprah said, 'I believe in James,'" writes Daniel Henninger in Opinion Journal re the latest false-but-true pronouncement from the mount:
Oprah Winfrey has thrown her support behind memoirist James Frey, whose Number One bestseller, "A Million Little Pieces" -- a vivid recollection of his drug and alcohol addictions, crimes against humanity and recovery -- turns out on a sliding scale to run from false to faulty. Mr. Frey's literally incredible life was exposed recently by a Web site, the Smoking Gun. Respondeth Oprah, and legions of Mr. Frey's readers: Who cares?
Can you say slippery slope? Goomp is forever saying we are doomed, and the soft, profoundly clueless underbelly of our pampered, history-aware-free fellow citzens makes us tend to agree with him. Still there is hope, big time, in our profoundly history-aware fellow bloggers. Check out our blogrolls for starters. We think it's going to be okay.
Update: On the other hand, Arnold Kling's "How Thinkers Influence Us" stimulates our gag response:
Ordinary people and scholars may treat the same ideas differently. In terms of influence, it is the folk beliefs of ordinary people that matter, not the beliefs of scholars.
Everything from Intelligent Design on down [up?] comes to mind.
Let us hope that you are right and that the bloggers will lead to "a new birth of freedom." Freedom from the mind-control efforts of the advocates of "we know best, and you are blank slates whom we are guiding to what we know is best."
Posted by: goomp | January 20, 2006 at 08:30 AM
There's definitely hope - where did Frey's cover first get blown? Smoking Gun's website (in defiance of a threatened lawsuit from Frey), and it flowed outward from there to the major networks, ultimately forcing Oprah to answer for her endorsement of AMLP on air. The fact that she fell back on the "fake but accurate" defense should surprise no one; I'm sure she thought about going with the more visceral "that BASTARD - he USED me!!" line, but decided against it because A) Frey's popularity from her endorsement fed back to her show and B) a lot of her less classy viewers would regard that response as evidence that Oprah was just "some dumb ho who got tricked" (I like her for the most part but her audience is not 100% enlightened and she knows it), which would lose her some ratings.
Incidentally, this whole thing hit when I was midway through AMLP (my wife's copy ahem), and was struggling with one of the Jimmy/Lilly scenes, the one where poor Jimbo was relating how he lost his virginity in one of the most pathetically transparent bids for a sympathy f--- I have ever witnessed; when I saw the expose on Smoking Gun I was like "yep, that sounds about right".
Posted by: Scott | January 20, 2006 at 09:47 AM
Scott has here provided an invaluable public service by revealing just enough actual specific content of the book to insure that I will never, ever read it. Thanks, Scott!
That said, I'm sure Oprah's ticked, but agree that her world demands the ratings, and her response was calculated to preserve whatever she could.
Posted by: Joan | January 20, 2006 at 11:20 AM
Anytime
Posted by: Scott | January 20, 2006 at 11:47 AM