Oprah's Vapid Harvard Commencement Address

Had Ms. W. heeded the advice she doled out to unsuspecting graduates, I highly doubt she'd be the media mogul she is today. Re the warmed-over platitudes, Charles C.W. Cooke remarks that

Winfrey’s rambling lecture featured the same series of fatuous prosaicisms that almost all university commencement addresses contain. And yet, somehow, it was worse. “In our political system and the media,” Winfrey proclaimed self-seriously at the outset,

we often see the reflection of a country that is polarized, that is paralyzed, that is self-interested. And yet I know you know the truth. We all know that we are better than the cynicism and the pessimism that is regurgitating throughout Washington and the 24-hour cable-news cycle.

This is what the English delicately call “total bloody tosh.” It appears not to have dawned on Winfrey that “the media” and “our political system” are “reflecting” those things because they are there. That is what the word “reflection” means. The country is “polarized”; it is “paralyzed” because it is polarized; and human society is — and always will be — “self-interested.” Our constitutional republic is designed to diffuse that self-interest and polarization peacefully, but that it does so extremely effectively should not be taken as a sign that our politics will be serene. They will not. 

Nevertheless, judging by her words, Oprah evidently thinks she’s above all that. And, as is customary, she elected to flatter the group assembled in front of the dais by pretending that they are above all that, too...