the secret

I took A for a walk yesterday to catch some lightning bugs, and talked to our neighbor for a little bit (I talked while A stuck his face in her dog's face and screamed with joy when the dog kept licking him). She was in the middle of watching the DVD called "The Secret," which she said everybody at work was raving over. And I betrayed my non-Oprah-watching-ignorance when I was like, "the Secret? what's that?"

Apparently it is the bestselling book on the NYT for about 20 weeks so far, endorsed heavily by Oprah and is an incredibly insidious self-help "philosophy" which involves the idea of positive thinking to get whatever you want. You think about what you want (usually involving some material gain, weight loss, lover, vacation), feel positive feelings and thoughts and then those things will automatically come to you. And the reason you're sick, poor, depressed, and lonely is merely because you aren't thinking those positive thoughts. Wow. All those damn negative nellies out there need to just lighten up, stop thinking so poor, and that crack addiction will be gone, their man will stop beating them, and all their evicted possessions will magically be transported to a McMansion in the burbs. And the best part is it's their own fault if they're still poor and ill. It's their own choices that made them that way.

Peter Birkenhead wrote an excellent critique of this crap, and it's hard to find a better, more succinct description of the American obsession with get-rich-quick schemes. He sounds downright biblical here, like Jeremiah confronting the false prophets of his day. Read all three pages, and you won't be disappointed--or you will be, with Oprah and the quacks who are bilking more suckers out of their cash.