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A Story of O
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Big doings this week, in the land of cuckoo clocks and lederhosen.

Well, big-boned, anyway.

And ironic.

Oprah Winfrey, the person who, more than any other individual, is responsible for having fobbed the first openly Marxist president off on the rest of us, has suddenly found herself rendered irrelevant by the one and only woman in the United States of America more stupid, more evil, more insane, and uglier than she is, Michelle Antoinette herself.

The Worst Lady.

Queen of all she can steal.

Any other political wife would be worried, I would think, about all the pretty little blondes, brunettes, and redheads who hover around the capital like a cloud of swamp-midges. I've heard it opined that there is more beautiful, available girl-flesh inside the Beltway than in New York and Hollywood mashed together like a starlet's boobs in a cocktail dress, demonstrating that power is a greater sexual attractant than money or fame. (I never understood how Bill Clinton could exhibit such mediocre taste, given the opportunities presented him.) Michelle is reportedly jealous of any attention her husband pays to a middle-aged woman who most closely resembles the "Tardis" on Dr. Who.

I have a theory about that, and you probably do, yourself, as well, but, for whatever reason, Michelle has made it clear, now that her Barry is one of the lamest ducks ever to haunt the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that she wants Oprah—the billionaire who gave him the Presidency outright, and more importantly, gave Michelle eight years of multi-million dollar shopping sprees and exotic vacations on the backs of unwilling American taxpayers—out of their lives for good.

Stung by such ingratitude in high places, perhaps by a string of business ventures that didn't work out quite as well as anticipated (I'm frankly surprised she isn't regarded as "too big to fail") and by steadily flagging public interest in every little thing she does, Oprah decided this week to run off to Europe—which, essentially, is Disneyland for socialists—where I'm certain that she was certain that her fame and great wealth would buy her a little sorely-needed adoration.

But alas, it was not to be.

Trimmed to its essentials, the story, which seemed there for a while to change about every other microsecond, is that, in Zurich, in Switzerland, the Great Woman spotted a pricey handbag that she conceived a desire to fondle, high up on a shelf in an expensive boutique.

I confess, initially, that I didn't give the tale full attention, especially when I heard that the bag was ticketed at a life-altering (for me, anyway, and probably for you, as well) $38,000, and it was used, somebody said by Lindsay Lohan, but I may have gotten that part wrong. I would never tell anyone how to spend his or her money, but, having made a living doing quality leatherwork at one point in my life, I would like to know what the flipping hell makes a purse worth $38,000.

Except, of course, for a wallet inside full of thousand dollar bills.

According to some sources, it was closing time. Vacuum cleaners were deployed and roaring (or whatever they do in Switzerland) and the employees were eager to go home. That's no excuse, of course; employees in places like that are eager to go home from the moment they arrive in the morning, but they're obligated to serve their employer by serving the purchasing public until the "OPEN" sign flips over.

However Oprah is said to make a habit of this kind of stuff, and has been known to bang angrily on the glass of a shop that was already closed.

Oprah says that the young woman who waited on her gave her the once-over and informed her that she couldn't look at the purse because she probably couldn't afford it. Now I've actually worked in retail; salespeople are properly trained (or soon learn) to make judgments like that in order to gauge how much effort to spend on a potential customer, time being money and all that. Every account I've read or heard says Oprah was dressed like a slob—that's only de riguer for rock-stars; I went shopping in Beverly Hills once, and the shoppers there were dressed the way ordinary people do for church in Wichita.

Never mind that, in addition to anything else she might be, Oprah is short, fat, and ugly. Never mind that Rae Dawn Chong, Oprah's co-star in The Color Purple, having kept her pretty mouth shut for eons, recently said that Oprah, basically, isn't fit to be a cleaning lady.

None of this has anything to do with race. So naturally, the first minute she could, Oprah went to the media (the only people in Europe who know who the hell she is) and slammed the RACIST button hard. The shopkeeper was prepared to apologize, the Swiss government actually did, I think, and the poor little shop-girl, feeling, I'm sure, like Dorothy Gale, swept up in a tornado, complained that nothing even remotely like Oprah's epic soap opera of prejudice and cruelty ever happened.

Later, the shop owner decided to back her employee up, and Tommy Chong went on the radio to defend his daughter. No word from the Swiss government.

Oprah burst into phony television tears, mooing that she didn't mean to single out the poor shopgirl, the shop, Zurich, Switzerland, Europe, the Earth, the Solar System, or this arm of the Galaxy. She wished she'd never said anything about it (although she got an extra fifteem minutes she didn't deserve, and a chance to plug a movie that—although nobody's seen it yet—is slated to win her an Academy Award.)

What the hell, they gave Barry and Algore Nobel Prizes, didn't they?

But for my handful of francs, a humble little shop-girl in Zurich, Switzerland gave Oprah Winfrey and the whole wide world a lesson in democratic egalitarianism that Americans need very badly to re-learn. There's no place for kings, queens, or royalty of any kind in this Republic.

In fact, if I had it my way, Elizabeth II—"Betty Battenberg" as a Canadian friend of mine charmingly calls her—would eat at Burger King like the rest of us whenever she visits her vast real estate holdings and thoroughbred horse farms in North America. Nobody here or anywhere else has any duty to recognize what others might regard as a celebrity.

Nobody.

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