Grande Venti Mocha Oprah Chai

NO, THIS IS NOT flN flNTI-STflRBUCKS RflNT.

I did that already.

I could update that bit this very second with my thesis on how Starbucks may be responsible for the pussification of America—I reresearch the subject once or twice a week when I stand in line there and listen as some limp-wristed, yellow-Lance -Arms trong-bracelet-wearing, metrosexual-hair-goo-sporting, Hillary-Clinton's-tired-oId-ass-worshipping puke spends 12 minutes trying to decide between the Orange Cranberry Vagina Muffin or the Pumpkin Cream Tampon Cake while fingering a Save The Rain Forest Compilation CD featuring Sting, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell, Sting's Abs, That Hot 19-Year-01d Blonde White English Chick Who Sounds

Like Janis Joplin and Sting's Penis-who apparently pops out of his master's yoga pants to sing his new single "How I Have Tantric Sex With Trudie Styler For Seven Straight Hours."

After a decade or so of trying to set an example to the others by storming out of Starbucks with nothing in hand and the echoes of my brilliantly abusive tirades ringing in everyone's ears-I have come to realize the one weapon we all have just waiting in the wings:

Oprah.

Because Oprah can shame anyone into admitting the truth.

There was an author named James Frey who wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces. No one was going to buy the book, besides Frey and the various people in it he blamed for making him a giant, alcohol- and drug-

ingesting mess and—of course— the chosen special few who had helped him climb out of that very very dark hole.

Then he appeared on Oprah and voila—the book became an international best-seller.

After many sales and almost as many months, it became known that most of what Frey claimed to be true in the book was, in fact-lies. Blatant, madeup, totally untrue and fiction-dressed-up-as-factual crap.

So Oprah invited him back onto the show and asked a million little questions about A Million Little Pieces and the next thing you know, Frey had crawled away cringing and crying and spewing I'm sorries.

Oprah had used her secret weapon: shame.

Shame shame shame, shame on you.

I wanna drag a Starbucks barista onto Oprah and have

her cross examine him or her and I know that within minutes she will have an open admittance that Chai and Venti and Breve and all that shiny sugary Starbucks smack is just an excuse to charge mo money mo money for what is—in the end-just another good cup of joe.

Oprah, my friends, is the cure for what ails America.

When I saw the headlines and a front-page picture on the New York Post about a woman who became a man but retained his/her womb just in case and then got pregnant I had many many many questions—a million little questions—but the one that bubbled up to the front of my head every time I read about it was "Does this guy have a dick or what?" As expected, no newspaper—not even the Post—addressed the issue. And if the Post ain't gonna do it—you know it just ain't gonna happen.

But God Bless Oprah.

If the story ran the first time on a Tuesday? Oprah had the guy and his wife on her show that Friday-she found them and flew them and sat them down and you bet your Oprah-loving fan site she said—about four minutes into the interview—"Let's get to the penis question." Turns out the guy has enough of a clitoris going on that it actually forms a small penis and him and his gal pal can have intercourse. I don't think it's any kind of Sting and Trudie marathon event but it qualifies and obviously satisfies them both. But that's not the point.

The point is Oprah.

Asking anybody about anything.

And always getting an answer.

Jerry Springer and Maury Povich and Montel Williams and Sally Jessy Raphael and all the other dig-up-the-dreggers who pulverized us with drunks and junkies and whiter than white trash

trailer trash in their tighty whiteys and cheap lace panties and thong-cracked asses have all died by the wayside—victims of Oprah's ultimate faith in just how smart you can be-no matter how dumb you already are.

Before I started writing this piece all I knew of Oprah was The Occasional Guy Click-In—that's where men dial up Oprah on the TV because of The Wife or The Girlfriend—usually in the middle of an argument about a towel that turns into a sudden tornado involving:

A. Sex

B. This relationship is going nowhere

C. You never talk about your feelings

D. All of the above but not in alphabetical order

And then in the midst of the teardrops and the angst and the stony sidelong looks she finally deigns to mention that Oprah just yesterday said blah blah Find A Better Soul Mate blah or Oprah said a couple days ago blib glib Is He Really The One For You? glub Oprahdey glub.

They talk about Oprah like they spoke to her on the phone on Sunday or she was just here having tea this afternoon.

In the past I blamed Oprah for all the damage Dr. Phil has done. He was nothing before her. Just another balding blowhard with endless axes to grind, but she made him into a star and produced The Dr. Full Show which unleashed him onto all of America, where he can say such thick and exasperating things as "Everyone has their own personal Ground Zero."

Oh really?

Does that mean someday two large speeding planes will crash into the side of your insipid, hairless head?

Let's hope so.

I was ready to steamroll right over Oprah—she was

the reason so many wives and girlfriends were disappointed and unamused. She was a one-note wonder, fooling feckless women with her Makeovers and Makeunders and a seemingly relentless river of Hope:

Men Can Change!

Children Will Study!

You Can Be A Better You!

What a crock.

Then I sat down and watched a few Oprahs.

I'm not kidding, guys—I got worried.

One day she was angry as she mourned her recently departed cocker spaniel Sophie with a special piece entitled "Lisa Ling Investigates the Hidden World of Puppy Mills."

The next day she was cackling in apparent Full-On Crush Mode as Gorgeous George Clooney detailed a practical joke he had played on his good buddy Brad Pitt.

The next day her brow became creased with intense concern about Security Clutter Foods-admitting how, just like the rest of us, she gorges on snacks she keeps around the house for the sole sake of gorging on them.

Security Clutter Foods? Holy shit.

She turned a harmless box of macaroni and "orange-powdered cheese" into something akin to a terrorist attack on her ass and—unlike Dr. Full when he invoked September 11—I did not wish her ill.

Instead—I threw out bags of Cheetos.

One show she was heavy. The next show she was thin. Or thinn-ER.

One show she was happy. The next show? Sad.

The show after that she was five different emotions in between those two before being both of those two— sometimes at almost the exact same time.

I was fascinated. Jay Leno is always Jay Leno. Jon Stewart is always Jon (continued on page 162)

CHAI

(continued from page 98) Stewart. The guys on SportsCenter might make a dumb pun here and there but they always just give me the scores.

Watching Oprah was like staring into a human mood ring—each day a glint of light from some unseen source shifted her emotional core.

Before I started writing this piece I would have guessed that my take on Oprah would have been skewed toward the nega­tive and that—like anyone else twisting a comic turn—I would be focusing on her flaws and foibles. But you know what I came to realize? It's impossible.

Whatever flaws she has, SHE has already found them.

Her weight loss, her weight gain, her impatience, her pretense, her most recent weight loss, her upcoming weight gain, her face her hair her legs her obsession with clothes? Done.

Holier Than Thou Oprah, Down And Dirty Oprah, Black Oprah, White Oprah, Oprah Outside Hermes, Oprah With Obama, 1 Was Molested As A Young Girl And Could Have Become A Stripper But Instead I Became Oprah Oprah, Mochi-atta Oprah, The Color Purple Oprah, The Oprah Makes Up With David Letterman Oprah, Skinny O, Chubby O, O In Size 10 Calvin Klein Jeans, O In A Cashmere Fluffy-Necked Puff Sweater—Oprah On A Couch, Oprah In A Slouch—Oprah Yelling Oprah Laughing Oprah Scowling Oprah Braying Oprah Giving Away Free Cars To Everyone—she has already praised, prod­ded and taken the piss out of all those Oprahs as she makes her journey forward.

Listen—don't sit there searching for my hidden, ironic tone. There isn't one.

I am way way, way way, Way Into Oprah.

She can do no wrong.

Let me explain:

First off, every single woman you or I know has a place to go to listen to other women talk about what women like to talk about which is pretty much almost any sub­ject you can raise outside of professional sports, removing back hair and inexpensive but sturdy hammers.

Meanwhile—I'm sure Oprah could find a way to touch on even those manly subjects.

Did you see Michael Jordan on Oprah}

Genius.

So here we go:

I just Googled Oprah and Oprah.com came up.

I sped through space to Oprah.com and typed "back hair" into the search engine and guess what I got? Infor­mation on unwanted hair and how to remove it and where to go to get it done. Specifically mentioned? Hair on the back. On MEN'S backs.

I did the same with "hammers"? 1 got Oprahed over to Oprah's DIY site, where the toolbox she suggests you keep at home includes a hammer section that— after much testing and research—prefers that you buy an OXO Good Grips 16-ounce rip-claw hammer for $12.98.

Oh. My. God.

Or should I say Oh My Oprah.

Wait. I gotta Google something else.

Hockey sticks.

What do I get?

Dr. Mehmet Oz—one of Oprah's many medical friends—talks to hockey legend Mark Messier about being a role model, how he stays fit and what kind of equip­ment he uses.

Mark Messier—one of hockey's all-time toughest, meanest, scariest competitors— has been on Oprah.

You cannot beat her, guys. She will Oprah-ize any subject you raise.

I am literally just going to pick random guy-type titles I know that a Million Man March Of Men Of Any Color would not only find funny to type onto an Oprah site, but at some level would have a very basic, slovenly, man interest in:

Semen count?

Ten entries, including Are Vasecto-mies Dangerous? and Can A Woman Be Allergic To Her Husband's Semen? (The answer is yes, by the way, and not just after a long day left alone with the kids.)

Scrotum?

You get Oprahed over to an interview with author Paul Joannides featuring his book The Guide to Getting It On.

Make my penis bigger?

Thirteen thousand two hundred and ninety-four results—including A Man's Dipstick and Treating a Broken Penis. I didn't even know you COULD break your penis. Bruise? Yeah. Scrape? I've done it (there was a girl, half a bottle of cheap vodka and a faulty zipper involved). But break? The mere thought makes me shudder.

Make my penis smaller?

Thirteen thousand two hundred and forty-six. Including Weight Loss And Penis Length—where Oprah says if a man loses 35 pounds he may gain one inch of penis length, which in my case means that in order to gain another Five inches I would eventually have to become just a cock with feet.

Now I'm just going to type in words you would never expect Oprah to say:

Tits.

Three entries.

Vagina.

Sixty-seven.

Pussy?

C'mon, man. Oprah doesn't use that word.

Here's a flurry of more practical male topics:

How to hit a baseball—1,755 entries.

How to make a woman come—18,898. (Stop laughing—it's the actual number that's listed right now.)

I'm just spitballing here guys—flying by the seat of my pants now:

Fixing your truck—700.

Punching a guy in the face? 3,793.

It's amazing. Now I'm just gonna focus on totally silly male fantasy theses:

Big nipples? 3,509.

Nipple hair? 1,383.

Blow jobs? 2,510—including a section called How Sex Is Like Pizza. With one of her male doctor friends. Jesus.

Areola. One entry. Which is one more than ESPN.com.

Ass lint—36 entries.

I give up. 1 give in. 1 give away my subscrip­tion to ESPN The Magazine in favor of O.

It's insane.

Like most men—until this very moment— I had no idea. I didn't know about Oprah .com until I pointed out the Michael Jor­dan interview—I was only planning on parsing Oprah from notes I had already made, but now?

My life has changed. My Google goggles no longer bear the fog of testosterone-driven prejudice.

I can't get these answers from any exist­ing sports channel. Scores? Yes. Scrotum health headlines? Not a chance.

I want an Oprah And Friends round-table section halfway through every episode of SportsCtnler.

1 want Gayle King to co-co-host Pardon the Interruption, running down a Twelve Topics In Two Minutes chunk of Man Stuff That Matters—sure LeBron James may be averaging 30 points a game but how are his testicles doing? Has he had them checked? Does he know that Dr. Oz says testicular cancer is the number one form of cancer for men between the ages of 15 and 35?

I doubt it.

I look at Oprah now and I see why she doesn't want to run for president. Why she hasn't had kids. Why she does what she does day after day after day after day:

We ARE her kids.

She is the be all and end all—the queen bee the queen mum the voice of reason and insanity and hilarity and disparity— becoming president would be a step down for her. It would only suck her power away. Would she be able to ask The Preg­nant Man about his clit/penis if she were in the Oval Office? No. Could she dis­cuss the best bras for buxom girls as she sat with visiting heads of state? No. Can she hold a press conference in the Rose Garden and ask a male medical friend to explain how eating pizza can help you get your husband hard? Hell no.

Oprah is where Oprah belongs—right there on the hot plasma rectangle that hangs on each of our walls, illuminating our bedrooms and kitchens with a warm fire of unending, uplifting infotainment.

Celery-Colored Sheets. Wow!

Little League Pedophiles. Oooh!

Cybill Shepherd On Menopause. Train Wreck!

She loves us she feeds us she makes us get fit she sends us out shopping and makes us redecorate she shields us and warns us and reminds us to have good sex bad sex food sex fat sex she gives us a sharp crack across the knuckles about race and religion and rich food and she makes us READ goddammit READ—read new books read old books reread the books she told us to reread last year—she is your teacher your mentor your multidi­mensional mensch she is actually married to us which is why she has no husband and will never have one:

That's how much she cares about us.

I suggest we make every sitting president

visit the Oprah set once every three months to listen to a million little questions about how he or she is doing on the job.

There will be no lying.

There will be no deceit.

No man can lie to Oprah and a roomful of Oprah women.

It's the power of O.

You've seen it yourselves with James Frey.

She will roast you and toast you like a fine hamburger bun.

Those gorgeous eyes, those luscious locks cascading down those round, choc­olate cheeks—no man can look at her and get away without telling the truth.

I don't care Who You Are, Who You Might Think You Are or how many big, burly guys are calling you God's Gift To Mankind. You get put in front of Oprah— all the bullshit turns to smoke.

And once the smoke begins to clear?

Strap yourself in, stud.

Roger Clemens would Misremember

and Disunderstand and wriggle and wraggle until she caught him square in her Cocoa Gaze and then he would try to look away and quote His Heroic Stats and hold up each of his Seven Cy Young Awards and she would still be sitting there—brown glare glaring, arms folded across her aqua turtleneck chest—wait­ing for the truth to ember it's way out of his gimungo, drug-thumping head.

And then it would happen.

He'd realize that women—especially Oprah's women—would trade all those expensive trophies in for 20 pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes.

He'd scratch his itchy, guilty, steak 'n cheese eating chin and come to see— there is no escape from Oprah.

He would wilt into a frenzied flopsweat of Dismisremembering and Reunforgetting and finally just break down and admit that his big fat ass-abscess was in fact the result of a giant set of jet-fueled human growth hormone injections. The Mighty Rocket

would fall back to earth in a puddle of his own pretension.

Yay.

Congress couldn't crush him.

The Commissioner Of Baseball couldn't lay a finger on his wide, sneaky back.

But Oprah could.

She would swat him aside like an insect.

Just imagine the other possibilities: con artists, accused murderers and just plain free-ranging dolts.

Speaking of all three:

George Bush would chuckle it up with a smug shrug and some fumble bumble Texas twang pulled out of the bottomless pocket of his nitwit pitter pat before Oprah's glar­ing brown orbs began to produce long, unlaughing pauses and suddenly—the man in charge of eight bad, ugly, idiotic and finan­cially foolish years for this country—would come to realize he was surrounded by a sea of unimpressed faces bobbing calmly atop Oprah's Angry Ocean.

The guns in the Harpo studio are almost all female and they would be pointed firmly at his prep-school privileged grin as it slowly waned into a grimace and he knew the only way out was owning up to how ridiculous it was for the American people to elect and then RE-elect a guy they thought they could "have a beer with," when in fact that same guy was a recovering white-knuckle alcoholic and would have to have not "a" beer, but six or 10 or 23 before calling his old coke dealer and getting the secret service to pick him up an eight ball, two quarts of Jack Daniel's and a bag of small, nonchokeable pretzels.

It wasn't God who was talking to Him— it was Cheney hiding behind and using a really deep voice

You saw what happened when Tom Cruise went on the show—picture George Bush hopping around on the guest couch like a circus pet on crystal meth and you'll see where we are going: you work in the White House, you answer to Oprah. Four times a year. I guarantee we'd all be better off.

Men in particular.

We'd know not to lie, cheat and steal.

Because—just like answering to your mom—Oprah and her army would be there waiting for an explanation.

Talk about the ultimate system of checks and balances.

We'd learn to do the things Oprah and the girls put on our "Things To Do This Week" list.

We'd learn to let the woman talk.

We'd learn to listen and stay in the other room and watch TV—let the girls do the shopping and make all the key decisions— from The Best Value In Ball-Peen Ham­mers to What Color Hammock.

We'd keep our mouths shut and do all the grunt work and expect no credit but get paid back with pizza.

Which might just be a code word for oral sex.

Just ask Stedman.

You punch his name into the Oprah engine and it comes up empty.

Areola 1; Stedman 0.

Doesn't that say it all?