In a woman's world of afternoon daytime television slots, Ms. Winfrey is meant to suggest something of the wholesome and sane, like a secret wrapped chocolate passed from her warm, brown hand to yours in a dollop of compassion, a butterscotch sundae of contentment. Peel back the golden foil of the soul, and eat it with the pathos of our mortal, passing lives like a treasured photograph of our mothers and children. Life is sweet in Oprah's kitchen, like creamy apple butter, and she invites you as a guest every weekday to talk about what women care about.

But Oprah's mansion is built on a vast, impersonal corporate structure that is getting further and yonder removed from the reality far below-- like a paper maché pussy spread on a pile of money at which we gang of Neanderthals in the hilly outback wave our pitchforks and tramp around with torches. How everything is a sales-pitch for bath & beauty products for hog-eyed women who ain't gonna get any prettier, how every man up there looks either like a dishrag fag or a whipped spaniel, how every celebrity guest's story works like an episode of VH1's "Behind the Music-- early struggle, success beyond their wildest dreams, their illusions crashing down around them, soul-searching confession, and triumphant comeback with a new book, movie, or CD to promote right there on the show (-- conveniently enough). Like clockwork!

And how every time the producers bring out Tom Cruise or Brad Pit, it turns into a moistening vaginal hot-house in the audience as women take to carryin' on and screamin'  with pink mouths and loud teeth like a bunch of panthers wavin' their tails down at some passion pit, slavering with the musk of catnip in the air before the hunk 'o meat "wraps up his set" and disappears backstage, loading up on a rooftop helicopter and getting the hell out before a mob of hussies burst into the green room and rip his cock off-- the damn thing slipping and greasing through the air like woolf'in dogs fighting over a sausage.

"Objects as symbols" have dubious value in the universe of Oprah and for those poor, misguided viewers watching at home. For instance, you have the selections in "Oprah's Book-of-the-Month" club which seem to put an emphasis on the African-American experience, as seen through the lens of rocking chairs and soul quilts and dried womanly secretions on some ancient, pussy-stink of a wedding dress. How some white groveler would solemnly herald that they stayed up 'till dawn reading the works of Toni Morrison-- plucked from the shelves of some indifferent library as a scum-froth of geeks, cripples and the elderly populated the tables, let alone the awkward, pop-eyed help who worked the computer behind the check-out desk and hung up the "My Struggle, My Freedom" civil rights posters at public expense with woodsy owls and smiling intestinal book worms in apples for your dumb bitch of a teacher.

It scarcely reflected the real attitude out here, how we took "the soul quilt" and fed it through a wood chipper while raising our beers and hooting. Then pissing on the scraps like surly adolescents. "The World of Oprah" could hardly account for our world, where "the niggers" were only kept in check by a security state that was losing its will "to walk the line" as America fell deeper into decline like the sun setting on 19th century Britannia. Unity with other-races-as-led-by-Al-Sharpton was impossible, because usually it meant us further "taking it up the ass" like a prison bitch of "cupcake politics". Folks were either invested in that sugar-frosted bowel-busting, or wanted to think more highly of themselves by not taking the low road that cocked the revolver and tracked the black basketball players jogging around on your television, only half-joking in front of your drinking buddies as we started raisin' hell again like cowpokes.

Everyone from all quarters put in their "2¢" on Hurricane Katrina. Why, Oprah even got self-involved and bustled down to the infamous dome like America's daytime moral conscience and drew back with a hoarse "OH, GOD!" from the stench. We all shook our heads at the foolishness and wondered why she got invested in "that Negro shithole". You could see the refugees from that whole mess in two ways-- either as victims of an unresponsive government or as a bunch of looters and rapists and unemployed crud who deserved exactly what they got.

Why didn't they leave town when they had the chance?!

Rumor has it, that the carnage got so bad that FEMA had to send in the army to "pick off" the worst elements whom were wandering around the streets like a bunch of "mad dogs" in heat.

The black ghettos sound like occupation zones-- like Iraq, or the howling alleys of Uganda. Stories about beatings and rapes, shadowy characters with spider-fingers huddling on the street corner and nodding to Africanized rhythms that drive fear into the heart of "white flight" keeping its distance. Even in our own St. Louis! You can't discount a story about the time when one of my friends went into the public restroom and claims he found a severed black dick on the floor-- and before he could stop his dog, it was gnawing on the remains like a chew-toy before my buddy turned green and fled the park with a finger up to his lips with a "gork".

How much of this is true, how much of this is neurosis, I can't say.

One can dismiss it all and feel comfortably superior until they realize a couple of things about these wild tales-- most of the time they can be roughly corroborated. And did you ever notice that the murder rate in that part of St. Louis is suspiciously underreported by the news? In accordance with Washington University's wishes, tied in with Barnes-Jewish hospital and local Fortune 500 company grants, the bodies are quite literally dumped over into north St. Louis to save the township of "University City" embarrassment and not to ruffle the feathers of college students, wealthy alumni, and the silk purses of corporate giving.

So it rises. . . . like the black St. Louis city Democratic machine, where an alderwoman pissed into a wastebasket rather than give up the floor and another sent a VooDoo curse over the fax-copier!

Folks move out to the country "to get away from that bullshit" and a pack of us were sitting around, watching cable t.v. in a split-level trailer. Country & western bric-a-brac decorated the living room, antlers hung over the fireplace, and CNN played on the television-- the stock ticker running along the bottom of the screen like something hard-nosed that most of this country lacked. Our host prided himself on being "a man of the world" and studied "the market watch" from the couch, leaning forward with half-interest-- an intentionally glassy and world-weary expression that said "break it down in 'plain English' for some dumb-fuck like me" as the camera stock-jockey's face ballooned with a snappy, fist-swinging inducement "to climb onboard the rally". We wondered what would become of him when he dropped even further out of society as an old Vietnam veteran pushing 65, or passed on to "the great beyond".

I figured he would be somewhere in Afghanistan sitting on the world's biggest pile of opium holding a Kalishnikov rifle and looking ornery.

Then we started flipping channels. NASCAR. Clint Eastwood in a "Spaghetti Western".

Next came "Entertainment Tonight". The personality known as "Mr. T" had beaten cancer.

"Mr. T's our man", we figured. Big, tough guy who kept it real-- like a cartoon character who told kids to stay away from drugs. He was lovably absurd, but we could look him in the eye and understand "that hardness".

Then came a segment on Oprah. There she was, "Ms. Creamy Apple-Butter" out on a mission to save all the children of Africa. Boys and girls gathered around her, tugging on her clothing as she soared on the wings of humanistic daytime television transcendence in the native "Mother Land" of ambling giraffes and leopard skin dress, closer to heaven than any of we numbfucks could ever be sitting around and drinking beer as evening's shadows lengthened and crickets sang their song of backwoods obscurity. . . . . a place where work was more plentiful than pleasure, vice more enticing than virtue as we rested on "our stake" and "locked in" for the long winter ahead, like drunken prospectors playing "Blackjack" in a cabin up in the frozen Klondike.

Our host frowned at the screen with a real ornery expression. He grunted, scrunched up his voice like a stingy Santa Claus, and said "Nyah, throw ya a chitlin', nigger!" and flung his hand toward the television set. I don't think any one of us had ever laughed so hard, as our host kept a deliberately straight face and went back down to cleaning his guns. . . . .

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")