Fare thee well, Dr. Laura

I love my Mom and I miss her daily, but I am also wary of over-romanticizing my childhood memories of her; and there is one memory I do not miss--Mom listening to Dr. Laura's radio show.

Mom would have it on when she picked me up from school, which always made me profoundly uncomfortable. There was just something about Dr. Laura I didn't like. I'd ask Mom discreetly if we could listen to music or the news or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on it as a child, but now that I'm a little older and a little more articulate, I know exactly what it is about her that bugged me:

Dr. Laura is a bully.

She is utterly devoid of empathy, compassion, and tact. She tears people down without building them back up. She kicks people while they're down; it's the sinner that most needs charity but she has none to give. She doesn't give people advise but rather bullies them into submission.

Desperate souls call into her program like the poor masochists they are, seeking some sort of validation or comfort or sympathetic ear, working up the courage to bare their souls on national radio, and then she just rips into their most vulnerable spots, mercilessly. In place of advice she gives verbal abuse; in place of sympathy she gives sneering disdain; and in place of understanding she tells you "quit playing the victim" and to "stop being so sensitive" and to "not marry outside your faith."

Like the sycophants on the playground, sad souls flock around her celebrity, begging the bully to beat them just so they can be around her, and she delivers it, repeatedly, with relish. She enjoys cutting others down. Dr. Laura didn't want callers, she wanted submissives; she was a sadist who enjoyed causing pain in others. She wanted to step all over others to feel taller herself.

Was anyone ever actually helped by Dr. Laura? Ever? I'm sure a great many people felt a vicarious moral superiority by listening to her, but I doubt a single soul who called in hung up a better person.

Paul wrote, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing" (1 Cor. 13:1-2).

Dr. Laura has no charity--nor for that matter does she have the tongue of angels. Her voice is a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. She has not charity, she is nothing.

Hence it was with some gratification that Dr. Laura this last week was forced to end her program--she'd told an African-American caller to quit being so "hypersensitive" about the racial slurs of her white in-laws, demonstrating this nugget of wisdom by repeating the n-word repeatedly herself, and concluding with "don't marry outside your race." People protested, sponsors withdrew support, she announced on Larry King she was consequently leaving radio.

The bully was put in her place. She'd treated one caller too many with contempt.

For bullys are hypocrites; they demand from others what they will not expect from themselves. Hence it was utterly unsurprising when, after years of telling people not to b.s. her or play the victim or be irresponsible, she plays the victim and appears on Larry King, tearfully saying she's quitting radio to "reclaim my first amendment rights."

Bah! She repeatedly uses the most racially-charged epitaph in the American vernacular and is surprised when people suddenly stop supporting her show? You can say what you want but you can't choose your consequences, Dr. Laura, which I'm sure you've told some sad-sack before. Those sponsors were exercising their first amendment rights by withdrawing support, but apparently the constitution only applies to her--the classic double-standard of the bully.

You can't blame the victim for 15 years and then play the victim yourself, Dr. Laura.

I'm even willing to be more charitable myself, and say that perhaps she really was just ridiculously naive in using the n-word repeatedly; her on-air defense was that "black people call each other that all the time," failing to understand that black people use it as a term of endearment precisely because it's racially charged--they are trying to reclaim and neutralize an awful word that has been used to keep them in degrading subjugation for 400 years. A black person says that word to express solidarity with fellow comrades in oppression. I wonder how she would react if someone called her a "hooked-nose Jew," then told her not to be so "hypersensitive" about it.

But like I said, I'm willing to assume she was just fantastically naive, but no, Dr. Laura reveals her entire hand, she gives away the whole game, when she finishes her n-word tyrade with, "If you're hypersensitive about it, don't marry outside your race." Wow. Segregationist rhetoric. Thanks for repeating racist slogans from 1964, Dr. Laura, that's mighty classy of you.

Because that's what bullys do: they reinforce the dominant social order, to keep everyone else in their place and themselves on top. But what bullys consistently fail to realize is that they are on top only by common consent; bully enough people, and someone's bound to push back. They forget not everyone likes to be stepped on. And even those who do only do up to a point--the submissive is actually the one in control of the masochistic relationship, a fact she never realized.

So fare thee well, Dr. Laura. I hope you learn more from this experience than your callers learned from you, but somehow I doubt it.