Oprah after Oprah

Oprah Winfrey does much good with her money and celebrity. Now that we have that out of the way:

The stage set of The Oprah Winfrey Show is something akin to television's public square. Part circus ring, execution platform, porno set, part self-help couch, weeping gallery and buffoon hangar, Oprah Winfrey's stage is a combination slaughterhouse-gameshow-cum-withered-diseased-brain-lobe. The cavalcade of idiocy that has pranced across that stage defies description and imagination. The ravenous life-and-dignity sucking quicksand stories of human misery -- interspersed with jaunty tampon and cleaning product advertisements -- staggers the soul.

Like the annual Texas A&M bonfire, year after year, Oprah piles reprehensibility upon blinding reprehensibility. The latest salt-in-the-eyes saga she presented was that of actress Mackenzie Phillips with the story of her father allegedly raping her as a teenager.

It's too awful to comprehend, but in OprahLand, awful is never enough. Mackenzie Phillips went on to explain how the nonconsensual incest with her father turned into consensual incest. It's beyond comprehension, but not beyond Oprah's palette for excrement.

Oprah provides a platform for the most wretched, diseased and deranged among us in the guise of "helping." Mackenzie Phillips, in her own Oprahesque rationalization, stated, "I can't be the only one this has happened to. Someone needs to put a face on not only nonconsensual incest, but consensual incest, and I know that I can't be the only one who's lived through this. So in finding this redemption, maybe I'm helping someone else."

(Then Mackenzie, be that face. [bristle])

The only people helped are the advertisers. Oprah is Mahatma Gandhi to her advertisers, leading them to the promised land of profit and gain and brand recognition. If she has to do that on the back of the incest-ravaged carcass of a truly troubled and pathetic human being, she does it.

And all the while, there sits Oprah's zombie-hordes of soccer moms, the oral retentive, self-righteously obese, feeding, feeding on the rancid beacon of misery before them. It's the first law of commerce: "Give the people what they want." Oprah does.

Oprah has said that she will retire from her show in 2011. The question arises, where and how will she get her frequent, massive fix of despair. Certainly, there is plenty in this world to go around; and never will there be a shortage. But Oprah Despair is a very singular beast. It is highly concentrated for maximum upset and dyspepsia. It is highly commercial. And it must be shared. Oprah's like a malevolent emotional Nikola Tesla who beams human atrocity into the hearts of people, generating a collective power grid of shit. Of pure shit. And due to her alien physiology, Oprah feeds and lives off of this shit; grows stronger and ever richer off of this shit.

So, where will she get the fix? She may go on to be one of the most unsuccessful suicide hotline operators, finding her misery in small, phoned-in vials. Maybe she'll become an even less successful phone sex operator, one who handles masochists who call up to be outraged and humiliated, as she probes -- hour upon hour -- into her callers' miserable peccadilloes, deficiencies and dementia. But both of those options rob her of Power Grid of Despair.

Maybe Oprah will have a Queen For a Day contest through her magazine, soliciting the most sad and terrible stories from her readers, the worst of which gets to be Queen For a Day, like on the old TV show from the 1950s. And after having a gaggle of unwed mothers, abused wives, drug addicts of varying toxicity, former prostitutes, and other assorted human debris opening the tens of thousands of sob stories, I can see Oprah filling a bed the size baseball diamond with them, and rolling around naked in all the hand-scrawled missives of misery.