PAPER TABLETS

She’s built her empire mostly by being strict, stern, and even hypercritical. 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. 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. Dr. 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? in 1996, and Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives in 1997. And now her latest book, The Ten Commandments, has become her fourth blockbuster.

But Dr. Laura has her share of detractors as well. 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.” 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.

Of Schlessinger’s early radio days in Los Angeles, Herman says, “Any woman she came in contact with, she would view as a threat. Tracy Miller, Marilyn Kagan, Barbara De Angelis, Mother Love — she systematically set out to destroy each of these women. She was the most vengeful, evil person.” Marilyn Kagan herself says of Schlessinger, “She is such an evil, vicious human being. This woman is very ill; her envy is so perverse.” (When Schlessinger was asked about Kagan’s remarks by Vanity Fair writer Leslie Bennetts, she hissed, “What a lying witch.”) Howard Stern, too, is no friend to Dr. Laura. Schlessinger turned down an offer from CBS television because CBS also runs Stern’s show, which she finds “morally incompatible” with her own. On his program, Stern promptly shot back that Schlessinger slept her way to the top.

Radio’s archetypal shock-jock, Howard Stern is hardly a primary source for truth. But Dr. 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. 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.

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. 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. Four years ago, Schlessinger converted to Orthodox Judaism, and since then she seems to have led an exemplary life. 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.

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? There are clearly many listeners in radioland who could benefit from this thumbnail explication of the ten primary tenets of Judeo-Christian moral law. The very success of Dr. 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. Schlessinger and her co-author Rabbi Stewart Vogel might well have called their book “Morality for Dummies.”

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.

The fact is that there’s something off about Dr. Laura, and as time goes by it becomes clearer and clearer. It’s not just the nude photographs of a clowning Schlessinger exposing herself, despicably posted on the Internet. It’s not even the reproaches of her former colleagues — too numerous now to be entirely dismissed as envious backbiting. It’s rather the thinness of her moral and religious imagination, as though Dr. 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.

Back on May 6, 1996, before she was nearly as famous as she’s since become, James K. Glassman praised Dr. Laura in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD as a sign of a hopeful national trend, which she may have been at the time. But she seems now mostly an epiphenomenon. However laudable her declared goals and however sincere her new-found faith, Schlessinger reads like the mystic equivalent of a tofu burger.

What her writing lacks is soul, and her explanations in The Ten Commandments disintegrate and fall away, idealess. The prose is so bland and uninspired, there’s not a line in the book worth quoting. 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.

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. Schlessinger proclaims herself an instant rabbi: Since “Rabbi means teacher,” she boasts, “I am one.”

Dr. Laura’s popularity — the feeling of Americans that they need her — does remain something of an encouraging fact in our culture.

But it also, and more profoundly, remains something of an embarrassment.

Norah Vincent is a writer in New York City.