A long-lost friend discovered me through the blog! And then she sent me a link to
the latest nutty thing on the best-seller list. The Secret claims that you can manipulate reality by your thoughts. For example, apparently the key to slimness is not looking at fat people:
If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it."
Fr. Brown's adage that those who believe in nothing will believe anything has become cliché, but what else can one say? I marvel at the Oprah lifestyle gurus because I happen to know one of them personally. She made her fortune when Oprah discovered her, but her identity and project are created out of whole cloth and the woman doesn't live by a single word of what she wrote --completely a come on and one, incidentally, of three or four personas she created for publishing purposes. She seemed very sincere when Oprah interviewed her, though. Anyway, the most telling line in the piece is the publisher's remark:
Nobody, she adds, ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public.
Would it kill us to stop believing in crystals, the number 23, that Tom Cruise is god, that Louis Farakkhan was taken up by aliens to another planet and just surrender to God? And as for the not looking at fat people thing. These days in the US, where else is one supposed to look?
