America’s most interesting cultural phenomenon at present is a 49-year-old family therapist with a black belt in hapkido karate and a Ph.D. in physiology from Columbia. Laura Schlessinger hosts a three-hour radio show, five days a week, that originates at KFI in Los Angeles and is heard by 10 million listeners on 250 stations across the country. The program went into national syndication in July 1994 and is second in popularity only to Rush Limbaugh. In Washington, she recently bumped Oliver North from afternoon drive time on WRC, and she’s been signed up by huge stations like WLS in Chicago, WABC in New York, and WSB in Atlanta. Her new hardcover book, How Could You Do That?! (Harper-Collins, 268 pages, $ 22.00), immediately landed on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list and has stayed around number five for 12 weeks now. Her first book, Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, has been among the top four titles on the Times‘s Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous paperback list for the past six months.
What’s remarkable about “Dr. Laura,” as she calls herself, is that she’s not the pop-psychologist you’d expect. Instead of touchy-feely jargon and sympathetic head-patting, listeners who phone in with their problems get a quick course in morality. As she explains in her new book, “The basic premise of my radio program and books has been that, regardless of emotional angst or tremendous temptation, to be fully human and to benefit maximally from the life experience, you must get back to the 3 C’s: Character, Courage, and Conscience.”
When I ran across Dr. Laura while channel-surfing the car radio, I thought I had tuned into a station from another planet. Here was a funny, intelligent woman-schooled in the arts and science of the mind–who, nevertheless, was more interested in getting her listeners to behave ethically and responsibly than in helping them discover their victimhood and release their repressed feelings.
In fact, feelings don’t impress her much:
Feelings are information that assists us, for example, in preservation as an individual (fear of a snarling bear makes you run/ hide/defend self) and as a member of a group (shame makes us avoid behaviors that would lead to peer/community rejection).
Without using what I call “manual override”–that is, a rational second opinion (based on considerations of situation, knowledge, and experience)– your behavioral reactions to these feelings could be useless, irrelevant, stupid, dangerous, destructive, and sometimes even evil.
She adds, “Generally, what sensitive people call communication is merely a highly energized . . . vocalization, like a bear cub with a thorn in its foot calling for its mother.”
The lesson for politicians and sociologists is that this message of personal responsibility is something many Americans want to hear. “She’s struck a nerve,” says Ramona Rideout, who syndicates the program for a company called Radio Today. And Schlessinger’s popularity is not simply a function of her talents as an entertainer, which, like Limbaugh’s, are considerable. A Washington Post Style section piece about Schlessinger last year portrayed her as a master of sarcasm: “She is spiritual leader of the You Generation, as in: You better do what I say or I’ll flatten you.”
Liberals would like to believe that voyeuristic and sadistic listeners tune in to hear callers knocked around. But if that’s true, it’s only a tiny part of her appeal. For one thing, she’s as sympathetic as she is firm, often calling her interlocutors (men and women) “sweetie” or “sweetheart” and meaning it. No, the reason she’s struck a nerve is that these 10 million listeners know that what she’s saying is right–and that no one else is saying it.
Here’s a typical call:
AARON: My girlfriend wants my baby.
DR. LAUra: You have a baby and she wants it?
AARON: No, she wants to make one with me. And I’m not ready. She said she’s 28 now and doesn’t want to be 30 without a baby. . . . She says that she doesn’t mind that the father is not with her.
DR. LAURA: She doesn’t mind? Do you think the baby might mind not having a daddy? If you were the child you wouldn’t want a father around?
AARON: Of course I would.
DR. LAURA: Then you cannot be irresponsible and produce a baby without a family just to humor her. That she could just go out and make a baby and not care about the baby’s best interest first shows that she is not ready to be a mother. She’s selfish, self-centered, and immature, and you ought to tell her off.
AARON: She seems so sure this is okay.
DR. LAURA: Maybe so. But you know something different. You know that the best place for a child is an intact two-parent home. What kind of woman would forsake that truth for what she wants to do just to do it?
AARON: Apparently not a woman ready for a family.
DR. LAURA: Thank you, Aaron. Now you go tell her that!
Schlessinger believes that unmarried people shouldn’t have sex or live together, that abortion is wrong, and that children should be raised at home by mothers. On this last point, she relates in her book how she was ambushed on the Donahue TV show two years ago:
When verbal grenades being lobbed at me about the impossible and outrageous notion of parent care for children in lieu of institutionalized day care got repetitive and annoying, I basically called a halt by challenging the entire audience with this question: “If you were going to wake up tomorrow mormng as an infant, would you choose to be raised by a day-care center, nanny, or baby-sitter rather than by parents? If so, stand up now!”
Guess what? Nobody stood. Nobody even spoke. It was a beautiful silence. I added, “Then don’t do to your children what you wouldn’t choose for yourself.”
As a regular listener, I’ve learned that Schlessinger gets particularly peeved with callers who say “yes, but” (she is sure the phrase means “no”) and “I don’t know” (“I know but I’m not going to say”) and “I’m only human” (” I’m a coward”). She writes in her new book about a 31-year-old woman named Gayle “who began her call by telling me she needed to let her mother know that at age nineteen she’d had an abortion as the result of carelessness in an uncommitted, sex-for-fun relationship.” The dialogue continues:
DR. LAURA: Gayle, why do you have to let her know that now?
GAYLE: Well, because my younger sister is in the same situation and I want to make it easier for my mother.
DR. LAURA: Easier for your mother? Interesting. What’s the one sentence you want her to understand that would make it easier for her. One sentence.
GAYLE: I want her to understand we can make mistakes, that we’re only human.
DR. LAURA: Only human? That makes me want to toss up my lunch. You do what you feel like without forethought or responsibility and then you say, “Oh, well, that’s human.” I see human as something very special. I reserve “that was very human” for something that was magnificent — like courage, altruism, artistry.
“Gayle’s mother,” writes Schllessinger, “has two daughters who had unprotected sex in uncommitted relationships and will have aborted what for them is inconvenient tissue without contemplating that the tissue was a grandchild to their mother. I suggested to Gayle that knowing of the loss would probably hurt her mother, then proposed that her sister have her baby and put it up for adoption in a two-parent family That way, the child would not have to pay the ultimate price for their mother’s moment of pleasure, passion, fantasy, and obvious risk. ‘Why,’ I asked Gayle, “does this innocent have to die because you and your sister are “only human” ?'”
Many of the little dramas in the dozen or so phone calls she takes each day are riveting. Transcripts of some of them appear in the two books, but Schlessinger is far better aurally than in print. Recently, a man who said he was blind and unemployed called in to ask if he should move to Florida, where his wife had taken their two sons after a divorce. She immediately chided the man for using his blindness as an excuse for not having a job. She told him to move to Florida since “father is not a title but an activity” — and to get work. In print, what she said would look needlessly cruel, but on the radio, it was clear that she was being firm for the man’s own good. To say she felt his pain would be superfluous — to shower him with sympathy would be destructive.
Schlessinger is not oblivious to deeper psychological meanings, but she considers them largely irrelevant in solving her listeners’ immediate problems. She operates closer to the surface. A divorced father recently called to say that his 12-year-old, who lived with the man’s ex-wife, had been taking the father’s personal possessions (a shirt, an old knife) on weekly visits. Amateur psychologists would quickly understand this behavior as a poignant desire on the child’s part to bring his estranged father back into the home — “nesting,” as Schlessinger put it.
But such understanding wasn’t her solution. She told the father he had to address his son’s behavior before the kid became inured to criminality: Tell him, she said, that taking things from you without permission is stealing. If you have to, tell him that you’ll frisk him when he leaves your house for the next few weeks.
Schlessinger writes:
The current pop-psych therapy . . . trend of alleviating most of all personal responsibility from the equation of behavioral choices is simply about making nobody feel bad — and that’s what scares me. While compassion would seem to dictate that we work on relieving someone’s pain as soon as possible, we forget not only that pain is very motivating, but also that guilt and shame are necessarily painful.
Acknowledging that you are basically the perpetrator of your mess of a life is admittedly very upsetting. But it is that very acknowledgment that gives you the power to change things. After all, what you can take away, you can give.
This is the message that most politicians are afraid to give: If you aren’t making enough money, work harder. If you want a secure retirement, save. If you’re worried about paying medical bills, lead a healthier life, sacrifice immediate pleasures, and set some money aside. Instead, they view politics as a game of succor and sympathy. What does it matter that the minimum wage will throw people out of work? To support it is to look compassionate.
Schlessinger’s success, however, shows that personal responsibility and self-reliance — the bedrock of her plea for courage, character, and conscience — are extremely attractive to Americans. Is that really such a surprise?
James K. Glassman, a columnist for the Washington Post, last wrote about John Updike for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
