PAPER TABLETS
Vincent, Norah
PAPER TABLETS The Decalogue According to Dr. Laura By Norah Vincent “Doctor Laura”—Laura Schlessinger, Ph.D.—has something like twenty million listeners in America, and she is, as Larry King...
...Laura recently made the news for her fight to keep a pornographic Web site from posting nude amateur photographs of her taken back in 1975...
...But she seems now mostly an epiphenomenon...
...She was the most vengeful, evil person...
...Howard Stern, too, is no friend to Dr...
...She’s married with one son, wakes excruciatingly early to exercise, spends a few hours working on her current book project, goes to work saving the masses on the radio, and still manages to eke out time for her family in the evenings...
...But Dr...
...Laura, and as time goes by it becomes clearer and clearer...
...But Dr...
...However laudable her declared goals and however sincere her new-found faith, Schlessinger reads like the mystic equivalent of a tofu burger...
...If you merely read the Commandments themselves (printed as epigraphs for each chapter) you’ll come away with as much as you’re going to get—and Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 make more interesting places to look for those Commandments...
...Only in a world in which hypocrisy remains the last sin is it possible to dismiss Schlessinger for a misspent youth that she’s subsequently repented...
...There are clearly many listeners in radioland who could benefit from this thumbnail explication of the ten primary tenets of Judeo-Christian moral law...
...But it also, and more profoundly, remains something of an embarrassment...
...And now her latest book, The Ten Commandments, has become her fourth blockbuster...
...Of Schlessinger’s early radio days in Los Angeles, Herman says, “Any woman she came in contact with, she would view as a threat...
...Schlessinger proclaims herself an instant rabbi: Since “Rabbi means teacher,” she boasts, “I am one...
...With all due respect to Rabbi Vogel, who gave this book the only glimmer of rigor it has, The Ten Commandments is a neophyte’s conceit...
...A sort of shock-jock in reverse, she “preaches, teaches, and nags” (as she puts it) the wayward sheep who telephone each day asking her to resolve their moral dilemmas...
...Schlessinger turned down an offer from CBS television because CBS also runs Stern’s show, which she finds “morally incompatible” with her own...
...and Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives in 1997...
...The very success of Dr...
...Sometimes it gets downright nasty: Her callers risk getting called “bimbo” and “slut...
...But everyone seems to love it, and her books sell in the millions...
...Tracy Miller, Marilyn Kagan, Barbara De Angelis, Mother Love—she systematically set out to destroy each of these women...
...When Schlessinger was asked about Kagan’s remarks by Vanity Fair writer Leslie Bennetts, she hissed, “What a lying [w]itch...
...Radio’s archetypal shock-jock, Howard Stern is hardly a primary source for truth...
...Marilyn Kagan herself says of Schlessinger, “She is such an evil, vicious human being...
...Former colleagues in radio have virtually nothing good to say of her and usually characterize her as a backstabbing Machiavellian dead-set on making it big whatever the cost...
...The prose is so bland and uninspired, there’s not a line in the book worth quoting...
...It’s not even the reproaches of her former colleagues—too numerous now to be entirely dismissed as envious backbiting...
...in 1996, Norah Vincent is a writer in New York City...
...It’s rather the thinness of her moral and religious imagination, as though Dr...
...What her writing lacks is soul, and her explanations in The Ten Commandments disintegrate and fall away, idealess...
...But that’s another way of saying that many Americans have all the moral grounding of a herd of goats, and anyone who’s gotten even a step beyond goathood will find The Ten Commandments much too slight to be of use...
...Laura By Norah Vincent “Doctor Laura”—Laura Schlessinger, Ph.D.—has something like twenty million listeners in America, and she is, as Larry King dubbed her, “the hottest thing in radio...
...Laura has her share of detractors as well...
...She’s built her empire mostly by being strict, stern, and even hypercritical...
...Laura’s popularity—the feeling of Americans that they need her— does remain something of an encouraging fact in our culture...
...The ratings for her call-in, psychological-advice program are equal to Rush Limbaugh’s and nearly triple Howard Stern’s...
...her envy is so perverse...
...Laura’s previous publications have all been bestsellers: Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives in 1995, How Could You Do That...
...On his program, Stern promptly shot back that Schlessinger slept her way to the top...
...So, what in the midst of all this swirl are we to make of Dr...
...Laura’s The Ten Commandments, her new foray into religious morality...
...The fact is that there’s something off about Dr...
...The pictures were provided to the pornographers by the man who got her to pose for them: former talk-program host Bill Ballance, her lover who found Schlessinger her first job on radio more than two decades ago...
...Laura started the wrong way around: spotting a hunger in America for moral discourse and deciding to feed it, instead of coming to certain moral conclusions and then turning back to help people...
...Schlessinger and her co-author Rabbi Stewart Vogel might well have called their book “Morality for Dummies...
...Shelley Herman, a close friend of Schlessinger for many years, told a Vanity Fair reporter that Schlessinger “doesn’t appear to have a guilty conscience, even though we all know the road is littered with people...
...Four years ago, Schlessinger converted to Orthodox Judaism, and since then she seems to have led an exemplary life...
...This woman is very ill...
...Laura in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD as a sign of a hopeful national trend, which she may have been at the time...
...It is worth observing, though, both that her initial reaction to the charges of hypocrisy was far from ennobling, and that she assumed the mantle of the repentant sinner only after the irrefutable proof of the photographs appeared on the Internet...
...It’s not just the nude photographs of a clowning Schlessinger exposing herself, despicably posted on the Internet...
...Laura’s program is proof that startling numbers of Americans need to be told, in the most basic terms, what they should and shouldn’t do—just as they need to be told what constitutes a lie, a theft, and a betrayal in everyday life...
...Back on May 6, 1996, before she was nearly as famous as she’s since become, James K. Glassman praised Dr...
Vol. 4 • January 1999 • No. 18
