Christianity, in [Rev. James W.] Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own.

This quote came from a NYTimes opinion piece by Kevin M. Kruse. I think it accurate exemplifies hegemony in action.

Hegemony, a term coined by Antonio Gramsci, refers to the various ways that a dominant ideology maintains its dominance. It largely operates under our radar, if you will, but its message is broadcast through the media (entertainment as well as news), through social groups, through education and religious leaders.

In this way, the belief system of the elite in power becomes the belief system of the powerless, even though it is not in the best interest of the latter.

It ties in well to the concept of cultural memes, but I am going to let you look up both (once Wikipedia comes back online…).

Anyway, it struck me as interesting that winner-take-all capitalism and Christianity, especially as practiced by social conservatives, have so much in common. Some forms of Christianity practice a sort of winner-take-all approach, allowing some people into heaven while condemning the fallen to eternal hell.

Even some people who have not even been exposed to Christianity: I win and you lose. This is how conservative economic theory works.

Kind of like the economic 99-1 split. The rich get richer (hey, I did it so everyone can do it — kind of like Lake Woebegone, where all kids are above average) and more and more people are slipping into poverty, living through their own kind of hell. The Republican presidential candidates — especially the patrician Romney — could probably benefit from learning about the Mahayana Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is a person who refuses his spot in heaven out of compassion for others who won’t make the last bus to Nirvana. He or she says, “I won’t go until all can go. If one person is still suffering, then I am suffering, too.”

A better story than making more than $40K per one-hour speaking engagements and referring to it as “not very much,” while paying about 15% in taxes. And to say it is not very much in South Carolina, where the average yearly salary is less than Romney makes for one speech, simply shows how out of touch he is.

But then he is going to heaven.

I could have told you six months ago that Mitt Romney would be the front-runner by now and the eventual nominee. The American people like to play around a bit, but they always end the love affair and come back from the political plaything to the political spouse. Ultimately, the edges of the continuum are more frightening than someone a bit closer to center. Kind of political entropy.

Willard M. Romney is fooling no one with his johnny-come-lately conversion to conservatism. He has all the qualifying characteristics the American voter likes to see in a President: tall, not bald, great smile, genial loquaciousness and comfortable on television. Left or right? Stance on issues? Doesn’t matter. He’s “electable.”

A story in the WSJ Saturday, January 14, pointed out that Romney is doing better in the “monied ‘burbs” than he is in other parts of America. The monied burbs are where, generally speaking, the stakes are highest, the desire to hold on to what they have the strongest. Conservatives, or even sham conservatives, always do well with haves who don’t want to share with (or become) have-nots.

It is also easy to be politically liberal when you are young because you don’t own enough or make enough money. When you get older, making more money, are paying a mortgage, are married with kids, and so on, you don’t want to share. Taxes suddenly are onerous and government intrusions into your life, although you likely benefitted from tax breaks and other “intrusions” to get you where you are. Now that you have “stuff” you don’t want to be told you have to share. So you pout like a 3-year-old and say that you want a new daddy.

Of course Obama is evil and must be defeated: he is currently steering the boat. Let’s blame him for the bad weather. Let’s elect another captain, one who will promise we won’t have to share our blankets with other passengers, the ones shivering and alone in the wind and rain.

The truth is that while students are amassing a staggering amount of debt while attending classes, much of that debt comes from educationally unnecessary expenditures. Today, students want to enjoy the fruits of their college labors while they are attending college, not wait until afterward. These are the critical expenses in their debt amount, not the tuition, room and board that many students claim they are still paying for years after they graduate.

They are just like the normal American who uses tomorrow’s debt to finance today’s frills.

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old man lamenting that the world has actually changed in the last 40 years, it wasn’t like that back in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was in college.

I, and most of my friends, suffered in poverty to attend college. We worked random jobs that allowed us time for a decent class schedule, we lived in sub-standard housing, we did without cars, and we did without a lot of the social events that today’s pop-culture obsessed students go to on a regular basis.

Seventy five dollar concert ticket? I was happy if I could buy food. Occasionally all I ate in a day was oatmeal because it was heavy and made me feel full. For several years I couldn’t afford a car because I had no money for car insurance. Riding a bike or a motorcycle is not fun in the rain or snow. But it is cheap.

Most of my students have expensive laptops (I had to go to the labs on campus even to use a typewriter back in the day), smartphones (if you were really concerned about expenses, why wouldn’t you go with a regular phone and save money?), and are always talking before class about the latest concert they went to. Many are dressed in the latest fashions.

These are the same students who tell me they can’t afford a $50 textbook. These are the same students who tell me they have to leave early for spring break because they are going to Cancun, and it was the only time they could get a plane ticket. These are the same students I see leaving campus in shiny new cars. They want it all, and they want it NOW.

I realize that students are paying more today in tuition, even in inflation adjusted dollars, than I had to in the late 60s. That’s a fact. (Tuition is up 50% in the last decade.) But wait, what about the net cost of attending college? According to the College Board, the average U.S. college student gets about $3,100 in financial aid from federal and state governments.

In fact, in my home state of Florida (which consistently ranks among the lowest tuition costs in the country – the national average is $6,257 and Florida’s is $4,373, ahead of only Wyoming), most college students are eligible for “Bright Futures” scholarships when they graduate from high school. This amounts to $126 per credit hour for high-level students with a 3.5 GPA and high 1200 SAT scores. There are also lower levels of support for lower levels of achievement: $95 per credit hour for vocational students and those who could muster only a 3.0 GPA in high school.

The cost for classes at my university? $163 per. That means that even mediocre students have to pay only $68 per credit hour. That’s $945 in tuition per 15-hour semester. Another interesting factoid: 91 percent of freshman entering my university last year had a Bright Futures scholarship at one level or another. All you need to maintain the scholarship is a 3.0 GPA, 2.75 for the lower level funding.

So four and one-half years adds up to $10,395, without anticipated increases. Granted, room and board and books add to that cost, but you would have to pay room and board even if you didn’t go to school. And you don’t have to live in luxury and drive a newer car and then complain that college is so-o-o expensive.

I think that surveys such as the one by The Pew Center ought to include questions about what students are spending their money on and why they are going to school. This would cast a better light on why students are in such great debt.

I also guess that students in the liberal arts tradition, those who are taking classes meant to increase the student’s sense of self and purpose in the world, are going to have different attitudes about finances and outside activities than those using college as a steppingstone to a career.

Clearly, I need to give this more thought. There are a lot of variables that need to be part of this equation; I realize that it is not as simple as it is being presented. But it is interesting. Maybe I will run a survey of students at my university to see if any of this holds up under closer scrutiny. It just seems to me that much of the debt racked up by today’s college students is avoidable.

What do you think?

Whenever I visit my wife in Northern Virginia and I read her copy of the Washington Post, I find myself reading stories I know I would have passed over in my local paper, The Florida Times-Union. Why is that? The question has been bugging me since Christmas.

I think what is happening is that the Post has such an aura (of…what?) around it that it just automatically makes everything seem interesting. Although, I think it is not so much that I think what is in the Post is more interesting, but that I make the opposite assumption about the T-U.

The T-U does not have the same staff as the Post, my thinking goes, so the coverage and the story are not going to be as good. Or maybe it’s the headlines. I am going to really watch myself read this week to try to see if I can understand what’s going on.

I do think that, based on my initial observations, cutting staff and thereby cutting the quality of the product, is not the way to go. You can only cut so much before you not only make decision not to read, you make the decision not to buy.

Admittedly, I am old enough to remember when it was considered correct to say, “I was graduated from college,” because it is the college that confers the degree on you, not you doing something to the college. It slowly became more acceptable to simply say, “I graduated from college.”

I suppose that grates on the ears of some members of the elderly cohort, but I hadn’t yet received my Curmudgeon’s license so the sonic pain didn’t register when that change occurred.

Now the phrase is being made even shorter, dropping the “from,” something I consider a major annoyance. (I am easily annoyed.) I believe that in 10 years, it will be considered correct to say, “I gradded coll, LOL.”

I know grammar changes over time. Language, in a sense, is a living thing. But I don’t have to like the grammatical evolution. I am allowed to complain falling standards. After all, I gradded coll.

NEXT POST: What’s the difference between the pelt of a dead muskrat and The Donald’s hair?  The answer may surprise you.

Ruffalo – you NEVER should have let your wife/hooker/girlfriend out of the house in that dress. Ignoring you the rest of night.

Giuliana looks like an alien! I can’t even look at her!

Are those boobs real?

I think Ryan and Spacey are secret lovers. But it’s not such a secret.

Effin Celine is doing the song during the dead people montage. Makes me want to vomit

What the hell is that? Looks like a leftover from a Charo appearance on The Love Boat.

–

Well, that’s enough. All the above are tweets from an Oscar night Twitter feed, or from at least as long as I could stand to follow along. The main “snarkers” carried on this screed for about 7 hours. People joined in on the fun as the evening progressed as they saw that all present embraced the obnoxious. I could stand only about an hour.

The fact that people think it is funny to rip into other people’s fashion choices, hair, etc., is not a surprise and even calling someone’s wife a hooker or claiming two men are gay (just for fun…) is, I suppose, a fair game in Hollywood. People can say what they want to say.

What surprised me was that the newspaper’s management seemed to support this effort by highlighting it in ads, as if they thought the “snarkfest” was a solid, journalistic idea. Is this what newspapers have become on the web and on social media?

One of the things I have been working on is my social media site and blog. That and preparing for a move and my first cold in probably a decade put me behind the proverbial eight-ball.

But more posts are coming soon!

Jumping the shark, of course, comes from an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water skis wearing trunks and a leather jacket (don’t ask). It’s a saying in the idiom that stands for the moment when — in this case — your favorite TV show starts to lose quality and popularity.

In my case, it means that I have lost relevancy as an academic leader and teacher. I’ve lost whatever mojo I once had. At least it appears that way to me, and maybe even to my colleagues and my students.

But I am going to try what Fonzie never did: jump back over that shark, not by backing up, but by making a U-turn and facing the great fish head-on. Stay tuned.

What about you? Have any good jump-the-shark or pmuj-the-shark stories to share? Tell me below.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (10-16-10), Jonah Lehrer discusses a study of 180,000 people interviewed about movies. The study was done to try to understand the pre-release buzz about a movie (The Sixth Sense) and how it worked.

Turns out 21% is the tipping point for movies. Once the buzz reached this many Americans, a successful box-office run was virtually assured.

The key point for me from the study was that there was almost no relationship between who was in the movie or how much was spent on ads and the pre-release buzz. In other words, waiting for buzz to happen naturally or trying to kick-start it with advertising simply won’t work.

Still, it’s clear that the old model of buying ads will not guarantee buzz. Because young folks don’t pay much attention to traditional media and their ads, social networking is the way to go. You have to create your own buzz.

If you are not in the game, you can’t win it. Get started with social media campaigns. Today.