Nude photos of Dr. Laura Schlessinger would strike most right-thinking people as insanity-inducing visions of horror to be avoided at all costs, something like what Prime Cenobite has in mind when he coos, "We have such sights to show you!"
But for the countless innocents who are even now messing up their lives with an eyeful of the sonic shrew's leathery bod, this is more than just a peek at some sub-Beaver Hunt dirty pictures. It's a democratic ritual at least as vital as an electronic town hall -- the unmasking of a hypocrite, the fall of a grasping Tartuffe. (In a telling twist, the genius behind the event is once again Internet Entertainment Group's Seth Warshavsky, who it seems will eventually own nude JPEGs of every American, the way Mormons monopolize the nation's genealogical data.)
But if you're looking for an end to Dr. Laura's smuggernaut, don't hold your breath. For all her paeans to the Ten Commandments and in-your-face endorsements of practicing Judaism (though apparently not getting any better at it), the Doctor's credibility was never built on her morality. It was built on hectoring.
And for that achievement, Dr. Laura stands naked at the apex of the era's strangest microtrend -- the rise of the yenta. Where the civic dialog was once sweetened by the kindly wisdom of Dr. Ruth or Oprah's magnanimous questing, these days the real attention-getters are shrewish, scolding fembots, tough girls like Judge Judy, Doctor Laura, and the legion of Clinton-busting blondes: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Susan Carpenter McMillan ... and floating above them all are the masks of comedy and tragedy, respectively, of Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp. And this is probably as it should be. If this truly is the Decade of the Penis, it's only fitting that permanent employment should be found by the league of women nutcrackers.
At first glance, these hellions would seem to be at odds with the spirit of the age. This is, after all, the era of Woman as Needy Noodge, as starved, simpering Teletubby in the Ally McBeal mode. And yet yentafication answers an even more primal casting call -- the hardcase Lady Macbeth who harangues her dithering half-man into strapping on a pair -- the Termagant from the medieval mystery plays, the henpecking tai-tai from Chinese comedy. But if the role model is always with us, the need is greater now than ever before, as moral standards decline, and outrage -- like God 30 years ago -- is dead.
In that sense, the power and emergent popularity of Hillary Clinton lies not in her public shows of loyalty, but in the severe, lamp-throwing self we suspect (or hope) she shows only at home. Team player or not, Hillary's easy authoritativeness invites us to conflate her with the various right-wing harpies who have spent most of this year trying to neuter her husband. And as poetic justice, it's hard to imagine a more satisfying version of events. After all, what could be a more apt punishment for an adolescent mook like Bill Clinton than to be slowly ripped apart, City of Women-style, by a band of enraged Golden Girls? Given Bill's demonstrated ability to screw up whenever his wife isn't riding herd, what could be better for the country?
And yet a survey of New Shrew habits reveals not so much a love of standards and practices as a love of simple assault and battery. Judge Judy's burden of proof simply brings sideshow jurisprudence to the other side of the bench. Where Judge Wapner played a wry Solomon to loony plaintiffs in the more genteel Reagan era, Judge Judy's "I don't like you. Get out of my courtroom" style of rough justice (now being aped by a new generation of male TV judges, none of whom do it as well as she does) turns Her Honor into the central attraction, an oafish My Cousin Vinny who can have you arrested for "contempt." Similarly, Schlessinger's show of Mosaic law has always been little more than a riding crop used to beat her legion of phone bottoms into submission -- which may be why the Dr. Laura mode, so entertaining on the radio, becomes boring lecturese when translated into print.
Not that the comparative sedateness of the printed word is a natural bar to this sort of thing. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has carved out an enviable niche for herself as the student assigned to take names of kids who talk while the national Nun takes a pee break. The target of choice in her Liberties column has always been Bill Clinton, not so much for matters of domestic or foreign policy (both of which clearly bore the columnist to tears), but for his unseemly style.
But again, Dowd's gift for censure never translates into anything approaching discernible dogma. Lately, Dowd has even made a gesture at showing she has feelings like the rest of us, entering into a romance heavy on public displays of affection with dimpled star Michael Douglas. You'll note, however, that Dowd only warmed to Douglas after he'd typecast himself as a cold-hearted bastard who gets physically and mentally tortured in Fatal Attraction, Falling Down, Disclosure, The Game, and A Perfect Murder.
Intriguingly, Douglas also played The American President as a likable doofus who has nearly lost his bearings after the death of his wife (the dead first lady, as in Independence Day and Mars Attacks, being the ideal teacher's-out-sick fantasy of the Hillary Clinton-era). But the Times' bloviatrix's exclusive focus on venting her inner-prig produces much smoke but little in the way of purifying fire.
Throughout the now-fading fireworks of Monicagate, the most entertaining commentators have been people like Chris Rock (and on the other side, Chris Matthews, one of Dowd's supposed partners in that Irish Catholic conspiracy of pontificators), who actually seem to believe something about the topic. Dowd on the other hand has kept busy hunting for angles. In a recent and celebrated article, she ominously painted a vision of an unnamed, sex-obsessed, cigar-blinded Washington preevert, building up the reader to believe the subject is Bill Clinton -- only to reveal in the last sentence that he is actually Kenneth Starr! (If the style seems familiar, it is. Change some nouns and this could easily be a Paul Harvey "Rest of the Story" in which the sickly, picked-on kid with the gimpy leg grows up to be President Warren G. Harding!) Inevitably, the column was a raging success.
Professional Clinton-haters, who had grown fond of Dowd's nasty spinning heel kicks, were disappointed to see one of Starr's best meal ticketeers turning on him at the last. But no man is safe when the Maenads really get whipped up, and Starr certainly brought it on himself. While the Independent Counsel has been frequently compared to a Salem Puritan on a witch hunt, few have considered the opposite possibility -- that Kenneth Starr is in fact the warlock leader of the coven, whipping his man-hating viragoes into an orgy of milk spoiling. (Significantly, after a brief struggle between good and evil, witches this year have replaced angels as the protagonists of choice in movies, TV shows, and spell-casting books).
Starr's real sin is that his brand of man-killing juju seems to have no effect -- or worse, to mutilate the wrong victims. He shouldn't be surprised that his girls are turning on him. But while the easy response of the embattled male might be to blurt out -- as Jack Nicholson, playing one of the movies' preeminent woman-haters, did so effectively in Carnal Knowledge ("You fucking ball-busting son of a cunt bitch!"), there's a much more effective can't-beat-'em/join-em response ready at hand. After all, while the sense of moral indignation is new, the stridency of the New Yenta is something drag queens have been pulling off effectively for years. Think how persuasive the Starr referral would have been if it had been delivered by a special prosecutor in a tulle gown.
After all, you don't need to be a woman to be a ball-breaker. You just have to be a bitch.
