Recent developments have persuaded me that President Clinton should appoint a new Cabinet position. It would be called the National Mommy.
I nominate Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
I stumbled across her nationally syndicated radio talk show while searching for Oliver North’s program on Washington’s WRC-AM. (I wanted to know what the enemy was up to.) Instead, I found myself listening to the most blunt, smug, shrill, arrogant, know-it-all pop psychologist I ever heard in my life.
Instead of encouraging her callers to feel good about themselves, in spite of the nasty travails life and family members had handed them, she was verbally slapping them in the face, shouting “Stop it! Just stop it!” “Get over it!” “Take charge!”
When 21-year-old Timothy, for example, calls in to bemoan his ho-hum marriage to the mother of his 2-year-old, saying, “I think I may have gotten married too young,” Schlessinger responds, “I could have told you that,” then hectors him about the importance of commitment to the 2-year-old.
Of course, I was hooked. I later found out that 49-year-old “Dr. Laura” (she has a Ph.D. in physiology from Columbia University) had just bumped North’s talk show off WRC, his flagship station. So she couldn’t be all bad, in my book.
Her program also has spread to more than 9 million listeners on 300 stations–second only to Rush Limbaugh, according to Newsweek–since it went national in June of 1994. She has spent most of this year on both the hardbound and paperback best-seller lists with two no-nonsense, no-coddling advice books titled, respectively, “How Could You Do That?” and “Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives.”
And for what? What, I wondered, does her sudden popularity tell us about the TSOAT–the state of America today?
I was listening the other day when a woman called in with a thoroughly modern problem: Her younger brother had joined a group of white supremacists.
Every time she goes to visit him he talks about how he can’t get a job because all the blacks, Jews and women have them.
“So, he’s a loser,” said Schlessinger. The caller, audibly startled by Schlessinger’s bluntness, nevertheless agreed.
“And he can find everyone to blame for his failures but himself and his own incompetence,” she said. Right again.
So cut him loose, said Dr. Laura. Forget him until he wises up.
“That’s what I thought,” the woman said. “But I wanted to hear you say it.”
Whoops, there it is. Most people know what the right thing is. It is just that some of us feel so tempest-tossed and out of control that we need someone else to tell us to do it.
That was when I decided Dr. Laura should be our National Mommy, not the coddling kind, but the no-mollycoddling, eat-your-broccoli kind.
She’s perfect for the job. A married, 49-year-old mother of a 10-year-old, Schlessinger was a therapist in New York City until she got tired of playing the “blank slate” who could listen and advise, but not preach morality. She wanted to preach. She wanted to reach over, grab her clients by the collar and shake them up. She wanted to say, “Forget your self-esteem! What about your character?”
Now she can do that, make more money and work shorter hours, too.
Washington needs her. The town is full of politicians who make their careers out of telling people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. Even when politicians appear to be stiffening their backbones and telling people to stop whining, they are almost always saying it to people who wouldn’t vote for them anyway. Conservatives are telling welfare mothers to get a job. Liberals are telling defense contractors to chill out.
Voices from both sides are saying they are going to balance the budget and cut our taxes at the same time. Well, if they balance the budget and cut our taxes at the same time, where’s the money going to come from?
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Neither side in this election year wants to tell the awful truth to senior citizens or anyone else that balancing the budget is going to require deep cuts in very popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the biggest items in the budget.
That’s why we need a National Mommy. Appropriately, it should be a lifetime appointment, as liberated from political influence as the Supreme Court is. Like the surgeon general, she would not have any direct power, other than the power to inflict guilt–“appropriate guilt,” as Dr. Laura says, not the inappropriate kind.
I don’t want to discriminate along gender lines. A daddy could be our National Mommy, too. Let’s call the job National Parent.
Either way, we need a candid voice in Washington. We need somebody to tell us that we are in bad relationships. We need somebody to tell us to sit up straight, don’t fidget and don’t pop our gum.
We need somebody to tell us to eat our broccoli. Every bite. It may not taste good, but it’s good for us.