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Dr. Susan
Block's September 16, 1998
And since the calls kept
coming, I dropped my copy of the Cigarr-er, Starr Report, burning
a hole in my floor, and turned on CNN. There she was, the Queen of
Moralizing Mean, resplendent in softly tailored baby blue, accessorized
by a flaxen halo of hair and that now ubiquitous sparkler-studded
Star of David. She looked very put together actually, except for the
fact the she couldn’t seem to stop Larry King was not bad in his encounter with her Righteous Reptilian Highness. Armed with Leslie Bennetts’ scathing Vanity Fair article and his own sense of basic decency, he kept her pretty well on the defensive. Obviously, he was also galvanized by the power of the Block Curse, as he had her stumbling all over her own sanctimony, attempting to defend her point of view that it’s moral and just to expose and humiliate President Bill Clinton for his sexual transgressions, but it’s "immoral, destructive, evil" to do the same thing to Congressman Henry Hyde. She used the word "evil" over half a dozen times during the hour. This, of course, was quite creepy, as so many people have used this particular hex of a word to describe her. She also did a turnabout so extraordinary, it reminded me of why I started you in the first place, dear Diary. Get this: Less than a minute after she’d mercilessly attacked Bill Clinton as "a man with repetitive bad behavior (and) no real repentance," she assured Larry King that "I have never attacked him (Clinton)." Larry astutely pointed out that she’d just attacked the man a moment ago. She brushed off that glaring contradiction like so much lint on her robin’s egg blue shoulders (and by the way, Laura dear, the stopsign-red fingernails look a little tacky with the robin’s egg). The whole maneuver brought back memories of September of ‘96, when Dr. Laura wrote to New Times that she never "bashed and belittled women" in the same paragraph in which she bashed and belittled me. She also complained that the article called her "evil." Ooooh, there’s that word again. Well, one thing I’ll say for Dr. L., she’s grown over the past two years. Her bank account’s grown, the amount of people calling her "evil" (and vice versa) has grown, and her hypocrisy has grown to such titanic proportions, it’s palpable. You can practically taste it--the sugary pretense of virtue commingling with the rancid practice of meanness. Yuch. Tastes bad. Get me a cigar. Larry asked her how she can preach to others that they must follow the 5th Commandment, "Thou Shalt Honor Thy Father and Mother," while she herself is not on speaking terms with her own mother. "That looks like the definition of hypocrisy," he observed. Go, Larr, that’s why you’re the King.
At this point, I started hollering at the television, "Impeach Dr. Laura!" It wasn’t very satisfying, but I had to do something. It was so frustrating to just sit there and watch. Max tried to get through on both the office line, where they refused to put us on, and the call-in line, which was busy. Thus, the hollering. I mean, noble and good as King Larry was, he did let her slide a lot. I guess Laura was just spouting so much flagrant two-faced twaddle, he felt it would have been unsporting to call her on it every time. So I helped him out, at least in my own living room, by hollering at the television. When she was disparaging some poor hapless caller about "shacking up," I hollered, "What about you, Dr. Laura? You had sex before marriage, you even had sex during marriage with men who were not your husband, and you ‘shacked up’ with your current husband before he was divorced. Even if you now think it’s wrong and haven’t done anything like that in a few years, have you no compassion for others who do what you have done?" When Larry let her warble on à la Miss Fundamentalist Manners about which of the 10 Commandments the President might have broken, I hollered at the top of my lungs, "What happened to the separation of Church and State here?" I was starting to get hoarse from all this hollering. Larry did get in fact that one of her ex-lovers, Bill Ballance, says Dr. Laura has broken all 10 (which makes me really curious about Number Six…). Then he provoked an interesting little snapping match regarding Dr. L.’s "I’m right, everyone else is wrong" approach to ethics and guidance. "It’s not that I’m right," she corrected him. "It’s that God is right." You could almost see the angels lighting on those celestial blue shoulders. "You’re not God’s interpreter on earth!" Larry exclaimed, visibly worried about this prospect, as Laura blithely talked over him. continued
DR.
SUSAN BLOCK'S
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I
had blissfully forgotten about Dr. Laura again, and was focusing my
limited supply of Block Curses on a more urgently dangerous scourge
upon the American populace, Kenneth W. Starr, when several friends
and relations called me in a panic. "Dr. Laura is on Larry King
promoting the book title she stole from you!" they squealed. Of course,
I’d never accuse her of stealing my book title (after all, I lifted
mine from the original 10 Commandments). I’d rather just continue
accusing her of being the vicious, moralizing, people-bashing hypocrite
that she is—until, of course, she gets down on her knees, kisses my
high heels and apologizes for calling me names. Hey, as we used to
say on the schoolgrounds: She started it! I am merely responding,
and responding…
making
the most bizarre, tremulous facial expressions, snickering at inappropriate
moments and spitting vituperative venom. For a second, I flashed on
her being related to Eve, my Akeeta Corn Snake. Nah, Eve doesn’t bite
humans and is not at all poisonous.
Laura
ducked, parried, blushed and grimaced. Her most definitive answer
to questions about why she and Most Honorable Mama are estranged (which
means, I suppose, that her beloved son doesn’t get to see his grandmother)
was: "Things are often more complex than that." Did I hear "complex?"
She who asserts that things are black and white, right and wrong,
good and evil for everyone else, pleads complexity when it comes to
herself.
