"Dr." Laura's Racist Gaff

"Dr." Laura recently


A brief comment, as Libby and I are heading out to Georgia to play some music for a contradance tonight. (Y'all come, if you're in the neighborhood--Go Bulldawgs). Dr. Laura's outburst Tuesday to a caller, which concluded with "maybe you shouldn't have married outside your race," is remarkable for it's regurgitation of the worst of "commonsense" views.

http://radio.about.com/b/2010/08/13/that-was-wrong-says-dr-laura-for-using-n-word-on-air.htm

I was happy to see Ed Schultz spend some time on the outburst on his MSNBC show yesterday. I thought "Dr." Laura looked rather aged in the photos he posted with the story. Why she's ever had a radio show and the presumed competence to give advice to people, I have no idea. What she's always been good at is off-the-cuff judgments frequently laced with sarcasm. She's a humorous minor character in a drawing room comedy, at best--Roz Russell in Picnic maybe. "Don't go with that drifter tonight, even if he looks like William Holden, and if you do, for gawd's sake don't let him in your drawers and ruin your life." Hopefully she's made a big enough mistake to get kicked off the air. As Schultz noted, the best way to achieve that result would be the General Sherman strategy. Pretty soon we'll have separate but "equal" grocery stores and banks in the US of A. Dr. Laura dancing on the head of a pin--has she got the chops anymore? Those nekked pics of her were from quite a ways back.

Update: re Laurie's comment, I think the only "place" for Dr. Laura is now as a character in a play or skit denoting outmoded and passe views from an earlier era. Of course culture being what it is, these various "eras" overlap, and for many, Dr. Laura appears to be a genuine source of cultural and ethical knowledge. Which I guess means that our great cultural schism reveals itself along many fault lines when we take observations with precise instrumentation. She has become merely an eddy in the stream these days, however. The big warriors are now taking on whole world religions and nations. The seismometer points to a big upcoming noggin explosion when the Repeal-the-14th-Amendment crowd looks in the mirror and sees a "Right-to-Lifer."