SOMETIMES AN ÉCLAIR IS JUST AN ÉCLAIR: There’s a theory making the rounds that the current economic downturn is a good thing in disguise – that being shocked out of the complacent habits of prosperity and the social status quo is the ultimate form of “creative destruction,” burning away out-of-date ideas and habits and forcing us to look at the world in a whole new way.
Sometimes, however, it’s just an invitation for increasingly tenuous and absurd lunges at social diagnosis, such as a piece in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast current affairs web magazine this week by writer and comic Jessi Klein. The subject at hand is Oprah Winfrey’s recent weight gain, the subject of an apparently anguished confession in the recent issue of Winfrey’s O magazine, which Klein sees as a physical reflection of the subprime mortgage meltdown and credit crunch behind our current economic insecurity.
“Oprah concludes that her latest chub-battle has led her to adjust her weight objective,” Klein writes. “She’s no longer striving to be thin, she says, but simply to balance health with giving herself ‘the love and care’ she needs. So 2009 finds Oprah and the rest of the country adjusting to a new resolve. None of us, no matter what the size of our wallets, can be perfect. But when we waver from our budgets, we’ll be downsizing our indulgences. For Oprah, that might mean a cookie instead of a whole cake; for the rest of us, perhaps a movie instead of an Escalade.”
It’s at times like this that the tantalizing lure of metaphor – for writers especially – looks like epistemological crack, cheap, addictive and damaging. Oprah’s weight gain is to be understood as one woman’s caloric interpretation of social insecurity seeking solace in materialism; it’s a sophomoric equation at best, one best discarded with undergrad English Lit essays.
It’s hard to compare the extra time Oprah might have spent at the snack table backstage with credit card debt and defaulted mortgages; Oprah paid for the food she’s eaten, after all, and her decision to supersize herself by 40 lbs. wasn’t facilitated by governments and banks underwriting fatty foods, and won’t end in seizure and public auction of her waistline.
Klein seems to think that the cure for our widespread economic bingeing should be the prohibition of Escalades and “cashmere-iPoddy things that should have been off limits,” and quotes Oprah’s assessment that her overindulgence was “a love issue.” Whatever imprudence might have motivated so much bad debt, love probably had less to do with it than woeful incomprehension of the concept of interest and the seriousness of the due date at the top of a bill.
