The Carruths

(Originally posted at Babble – posted here because Ben and i co-wrote it and i think it’s pretty damn burly.)

So, yeah. The whole Oprah thing.

She has more wealth than some countries on the map. She’s one of the most powerful and influential women in this hemisphere, and she hates her body.

There’s probably a whole lot that can be said about this, but i think ultimately it comes to this: money can’t buy happiness. Money can’t buy self-esteem. If you don’t like yourself when you’re fat, losing weight might give you a warm glowy fuzzy for a while, but you’re still the same person on the inside. Eventually, that’s going to catch up with you.

If you don’t like yourself or your body, there are no quick fixes. No special book is going to flick a switch that will make all of your negativity go away. No one has a magic wand for this kind of thing. You can’t just immediately love a random stranger on the street, right? So learning how to love yourself means taking the time to figure out who the hell you are. A book can’t tell you who you are. A talk show host can’t tell you who you are. The only person who can figure it out is you.

About a dozen years ago, i was on the tail end of an incredibly dysfunctional relationship. Dude told me, among other things, that he didn’t like my dark bits, my negativity. In my desperation to cling to the remnants of a co-dependent relationship, i decided i was going to be an eternal ray of sunshine. Always smiling, always cheerful, always looking for the good in things. For a while, it worked. After about a month, i started to have the worst nightmares of my life. I had pushed that negativity so far down that it could only come through in my dreams – and boy, did it ever. It wasn’t gone, it was just hiding and festering. It wasn’t until i realized that i needed to accept all of myself, good and bad – and to hell with him if he couldn’t – that the nightmares stopped.

Ben would like to note, here: in field medicine, one of the most important (and slightly counter-intuitive) principles is that you never ever ever cover a wound that is already infected.

I can’t tell you who you are or why you should like yourself – and neither can Oprah. Oh sure, i can tell you why it’s a good idea, but the finer details are up to you. Don’t push any part of yourself away, because i can guarantee you that it will come back to bite you in the ass. No matter what size that ass is.

Again, from Ben:

A note on Oprah: why would anyone be surprised that the message and values from one of the most influential women in the hemisphere would be common? More or less, the kind of thing that we would expect? There’s a bit of chicken and egg thing there, but very few people rise to influence and power (in their lifetimes) by contradicting the viewpoints of their supporters. We don’t support the heroes or leaders that have better ideas than we have. We support the ones that have similar ideas to the ones we have. Given all of the known factors, why would we be at all surprised that the voice of the American Woman is a little fluffy, more than a little superficial, and has at least a hint of self-loathing?

I view Oprah as a very disturbing symptom. There are three parts to this problem. First, that these ideas and that this model of identity is popular enough to have mass support. Second, by virtue of it’s exposure and that popular support, it has a lot of influence. Those two are a feedback loop – they feed into each other endlessly. The more influential, the more support it gets, and vice versa. One of the more disturbing elements of that feedback loop is that this paradigm presents, calls, and identifies itself as revolutionary. And in so doing, all but perfectly subverts any attempt to introduce a genuinely visionary idiom.

This viewpoint quite literally owns the copyright on radical feminine identity. The mainstream can and has claimed the dynamic social energy that is the rightful property of any force for change. Anything that puts itself out there as The New And The Different, it’s a very effective mechanism for retarding social progress: take the banal, take the bland, take the mainstream, and (at worst) take the most ineffective, vacuous, and insubstantial version possible of the kind of change that people want and will support, and label it as the revolution they so desperately need.

That ties into the third element of this that i find disturbing – that this is a message and perspective which is presumed to be of widespread enough appeal, and reliable enough appeal that it is viewed as a sound investment. This is a message that is sufficiently safe that those that are in the business of making such decisions do not feel that sinking a fortune into airtime, advertising dollars, and franchising is an economic risk. This is, in a social sense and a fiscal sense, a safe message. Now, consider that within the context of identity-focused feminism, and concerns about the way women are portrayed in media, in the images they are fed, and general objections to ideas that women are taught to hold true of themselves. Now ask: is a “safe message” one that you want?

Think about all of the things that a message would have to be in agreement with, or at least non-threatening to, in order to be considered economically safe. And then ask if this is a thing, firstly, that you wish to support, second: if/when the spokespersons for said safe message express self-loathing, dissatisfaction, and an incompleteness of personhood that can only be alleviated by opening the wallet – if, when this occurs, you have any right to be surprised.

There are few means of social and economic control as reliable, as virulent, and as pernicious as control over identity.

Tangent: we would do well to be cautious in our selection of heroes. One of the loudest and most swiftly-forgotten themes of the mid to late 70s punk movement was summarized very simply and aptly in the title of a documentary dedicated to the subject: Kill Your Heroes. While people at the time, and even now, may associate that phrase (or the idea that it implies) with an unrequited love of Jodie Foster, or the tragic loss of John Lennon, the spirit of the idea hearkens back to a far older phrase: “When you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” This is why i say punk is, in many ways, very loud Buddhism.

For those unfamiliar with the idea, the essence of it is this: a hero in the flesh, speaking, talking, acting at the same time that they are worshiped, can be strings tied to the joints of your idealism – with the other end held by hands unseen. This does not necessarily mean conspiracy or conscious manipulation, but rather that you have, in allowing your ideas to be invested in the form of another person, put the value, endurance and character of those ideas in hands whose actions you cannot see. When you call someone a hero, you cannot know, can never know, why they are a hero – can never know the internal conflicts, the decisions, the compositional indulgences, or the second thoughts that go on behind the things that you see, and to which you assign this quality of hero. You are setting yourself up to be betrayed by the humanity of your heroes, and you have betrayed your heroes in making them less than human.

There’s more.

The other lesson of Siddhartha and Sid Vicious is that the living hero is your declared boundary of virtue. They are the paragon, the apex of that to which you aspire. To wit, a line you are not willing to exceed. There are few experiences as potentially painful and horrifying as surpassing one’s heroes. This is an experience of such terror that most will recoil from the idea, devalue or reject their own progress and accomplishments, rather than acknowledge the simple proposition that, having been inspired by someone who did well, they have done better. Or, having been inspired by someone who did the best they could, we have done the best we can – and that perhaps those results look different from those which we sought to emulate.

There’s still more.

Still another lesson, directly intended by the Buddhist phrasing and subsequently commented on at length, is that when we can point to the best – the best thing, the best idea, the best person, the best virtue, the best saint – our ideas have become fixed. We can no longer change, we can no longer adapt; we no longer observe, digest and integrate: we compare and emulate… A necessary activity, a necessary process, but a very poor substitute for being able to do these things – and others as well. A theme frequently repeated in Eastern thought is that there is no one thing, one idea so good as to warrant the exclusion of others.

Still another way to approach these truisms, and they ideas they impart, is a slight rephrasing which may make their intended message clearer to the modern ear: kill your ideas of your heroes. Ruthlessly search your thoughts, search your ideas for the cold, inflexible, ageless alabaster statues of your heroes – and smash them to pieces. Those mental statues that we construct in honor of people – who are people as we are people – all too often, for us, become substitutes for the people. It is entirely too easy for us to envision our heroes living as we have enshrined them. It is entirely too easy for us to, on some level, believe that that is actually how they lived. That we do not build statues because of what they did, but because they did what they did because they were, in a sense, already statues.

Oprah Winfrey is a woman in a position of cultural and economic power because there are many for whom she makes an acceptable statue. Before we judge too harshly those who put an offering bowl at her feet, let us consider carefully those who have already placed their coin in it. As we do so, we would do well to do so gently and charitably, as we must (if we are honest) eventually recognize our own coin within the coffers.

(And yes: i was the one who typed it all out as Ben was saying it. Which means that my hands are a bit tired, but also means that any grammatical oddities are the result of taking all that dictation. Wooga.)