|
Rick's Notebook
Profile of the author |
| "Some Cynical Guy" No. 15: October
6, 2000
The Cynical Guy Watches Oprah A few days ago a violent thunderstorm briefly blew out the power in my neck of the woods. When the lights went back on, I couldn't connect to the Internet or, for that matter, hear a dial tone on my cordless phone; apparently the phone had been terminally fried by a malevolent bolt of lightning. I panicked for a few minutes— how would I survive without my Internet connection? My e-mail! My website! My e-Bay bid on John C. Calhoun's autograph! I still had an older phone that worked, but I couldn't move it to the site of the recently electrocuted one; it had only one wire running from it while the defunct phone had two, and I'm no electrician. The bottom line was that I'd have to live without the Internet until I could replace the dead phone. I'd survive somehow. After all, I had survived without the Internet for several decades before I ventured online. I'd live by my wits, like Pre-Electronic Man, like a proud Algonquin warrior. So I immediately started watching daytime TV. Since I almost never turn on the tube by daylight, much of what I saw seemed strikingly alien to me. I felt like Balboa casting his eyes on the newly discovered Pacific. First, to get my feet wet, I watched a few minutes of CNBC. Staring at the moving stock ticker made me dizzy, so I ventured into the heavier stuff: a minute or so of a generic soap opera (they all look alike to this cynic), two minutes more of a cooking show, then a tumultuous cartoon with wide-eyed superheroes and shameless children's commercials that haven't essentially changed their tactics in forty years. But quickly I succumbed to a furtive desire that I could no longer suppress: I had to watch a daytime talk show! Oprah Winfrey seemed the logical choice; after all, here was the definitive talkmistress, a legend in her own time-slot. Triumphing over her rough-and-tumble childhood, she had quickly emerged from nowhere to topple good-natured, silver-thatched feminist Phil Donahue from his perch as the monarch of daytime TV. By now she was a one-woman entertainment-and-uplift-industry: talk-show host, magazine publisher, author, tabloid fixture, perpetual fiancée. She wielded the uncanny power to turn books by obscure, female-friendly authors into overnight bestsellers; she pitched herself as confidante and best girlfriend to countless millions of housebound women. In fact, she was vying with the formidable Martha Stewart for the title of Most Successful Woman in American History. I had to watch Oprah, and so I did. There she was on my TV screen, the woman herself. Bright-eyed, genial, handsome and apparently ageless, still pleasingly plump despite her famous dieting, she immediately engaged my attention with her direct gaze, obvious warmth, dazzling white smile and gentle wit. Extremely gentle. In fact, gentleness was what her show seemed to be all about. Among the guests she featured on her show that day: an older couple who had adopted thirty-five (count 'em!) children with various disabilities... a formerly impoverished ghetto family that had turned itself around after losing a son to gunfire... a couple who had adopted a pair of Russian boys with amputated legs... a couple who had raised half a dozen children, EVERY ONE of whom became a DOCTOR (and all Harvard grads to boot)... a white couple who had anonymously supported a black family in Mississippi, then finally met them for the first time. There were sobs and tears aplenty from the good couples as well as from the audience. Oprah seemed to bask in all the frothy benevolence as if she had immersed herself in a Jacuzzi of the emotions. No doubt millions of viewers across America were reaching for the Kleenex box. It was as if 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' had finally made it to television. I like to think of myself as a 'kinder, gentler cynic'— a relatively decent and unmalicious sort of guy. I don't detest exhibitions of genuine goodness and stoutness of heart— quite the contrary, in fact. So why did I find myself growing subtly irritated by all the unadulterated niceness that wafted into my living room? Was it because I had never committed such unbridled acts of charity myself? Because I knew that Oprah and her audience would never buy my dark, disgruntled brand of writing and turn me into an approved male superstar author like Wally Lamb? (Isn't that a perfect name for a male author who wants to earn plaudits from a sensitive, predominantly female audience? Meek, mild, nonthreatening, vegetarian-sounding— you can bet that Mickey Spillane would never make it in this world.) Or was it something else: an undercurrent of self-congratulation, perhaps? A whiff of missionary loftiness and pride? If these good folks were REALLY so virtuous, why did they feel the need to broadcast their good deeds to millions of moist-eyed television viewers? Am I being too cynical? I changed the channel to see what else was on. There was Sally Jesse Raphael, everyone's bespectacled aunt, pandering to her downscale audience with the sensational stuff of true tabloid TV: a twelve-year-old girl who confessed to her horrified guardian that she had engaged not only in sex but PROSTITUTION, with drinking and drugs thrown in for good measure... a teenage white male skinhead who spewed venom against blacks, Mexicans, gays, Jews, East Asians and just about anyone else who wasn't a teenage white male skinhead. (His mother, apparently shocked, threatened to evict him from the nest.) I watched, I listened, I shook my head in dark cynical amusement while the audience whooped and moaned like the congregation at a revival meeting. Whether the show was scripted, and the poor players merely good actors, I couldn't accurately judge. But I confess that the sins of the misbegotten made for compulsive viewing. No suburban saints or missionaries would ever gather on Sally Jesse Raphael's show. Here was the rotten underbelly of contemporary life in a convenient televised nutshell... here was willful depravity, loss of innocence and the ugly butt-end of the American dream in all its sordid decrepitude. And I had to admit that as pure entertainment it ran rings around Oprah. It's a good thing even for us cynics that millions of viewers still respond to the saints and missionaries, or this country could be in real trouble. © 2000 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. "Some Cynical Guy" column archive:
|
|
Rick Bayan was born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he enjoyed an idyllic suburban childhood—the perfect background for a lifetime of cynical disillusionment. He has held a number of typical jobs for an idealistic liberal arts graduate, including assistant editor of Rubber Age and managing editor of Container News. At Time-Life Books he was assigned to write about plumbing fixtures. His work as copy chief for Day-Timers, Inc.,
won six advertising awards, none of which dampened his cheerfully morose view of business and life. He has written three books, including
Words That Sell and The Cynic's Dictionary, and tons of junk mail. Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online.
|
