ROAR ON, CULTURE WARRIOR

The Oprahfication of Bill O’Reilly and how people can’t handle the Right

“Do you want to live in Holland? Or do you want to live in a traditional United States?” Bill O’Reilly, with little substantive rebuttal from Oprah and her guests. | Oprah.com

Oprah Winfrey’s ongoing campaign to bring shallow sound bite political analysis to a new generation of her suburbanite fans hit a new low today. Oprah’s interview with radical culture warrior Bill O’Reilly, of FOX News fame, is just another example of how the conservative polemics continue to tear apart the political fabric that unites Americans. But the very fact that O’Reilly was invited by the unabashedly liberal media tycoon and therapist-to-the-stars shows that the saner half of America’s red-blue cultural divide just doesn’t get it.

Mr. O’Reilly, for his part, was his usual self, usual in this case including roaring tirades and the alleged sexual harassment of his employees. The con shock-jock labelled vapidly moderate New York Times columnist Frank Rich as a simple Bush hater, accused his critics in the audience of being “far-Left wing” and “FOX-haters” and called the ACLU “the most dangerous organization in America” for its defence of NAMBLA’s very right to exist in a nation defined by freedom of expression. O’Reilly played his ongoing part as the five-star general in America’s culture war, the partisan polemicist who throws reason and facts to the wind in order to gain ratings, sell books, and stoke the rage of so-called “traditionalists” (read: narrow-minded conservatives) so that they, like so many armed zealots, would rise up and crush the “secular-progressives” (read: conservatives, moderates and liberals, regardless of faith, who think he’s nuts).

The perfect representative, Oprah thought, of respectable conservative political thought in America.

Winfrey is, of course, herself no con. She can also be a thoughtful and conscientious journalist, as when she, in the early 90s, stopped episodes of her iconic talk show that gave audience to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The radicals that divide and dissemble don’t deserve more exposure to Oprah’s precious airtime. And of course, neither does O’Reilly, the king of divisive rhetoric and no fan of free speech other than his own—no less, the author of a best-selling book called Cultural Warrior.

In Winfrey’s noble albeit misguided attempts to search for truth in America through the medium that has brought her so much influence, we see the true failure: anti-O’Reilly audience members who can’t quite grasp, let alone articulate, why an organization like the American Civil Liberties Union would ever provide pro bono work for vile organizations like the Klan or a pedophile advocacy group (While I don’t fully personally support the ACLU’s decisions, I can at least get their point: It’s the civil liberties, stupid.); largely inarticulate liberals who were easily painted as radicals and “moral relativists”; and, of course, “traditionalists” who had heartfelt and genuine, if not reasonable or well founded, beliefs about the war on terrorism, “special interests,” torture, the war in Iraq, and other issues, beliefs that apparently still resonate with a large number of Americans. With impotent attacks against O’Reilly’s logic comes the victory for misinformation and delusion. Uninformed viewers might come away with the idea that, somehow, someway, Iraq=war on terror, the ACLU=NAMBLA, that liberal=amoral weenie. Oprah could have easily brought on more reasonable conservative voices in the name of equal time (she recently gave full hours to both Rich and Democratic Senator Barack Obama), as Rich Lowry or David Brooks or the like would have at least provided some semblance of reasonable discussion. But I guess bite-sized stupidity, like a Maya Angelou aphorism, is easier to swallow than the whole gritty, unphotogenic truth.

If you could reduce the problems with American political discourse to one thing (which of course you can’t), it wouldn’t be the well-funded Right-wing Jacobins who in so many ways dominate the political agenda, but the often clueless progressive and moderate Americans who, for whatever reasons, remain more or less feeble before la Montagne, facts and election results be damned. End.