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Hamburger Helper

Professor Paul Apostolidis of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington (isn't that a tongue twister) published an article "Hegemony and Hamburger" in 2005 that points out the obvious--organized labor depends on a ready source of new workers and can manipulate the Mexican immigrant story to its advantage. So while I was googling this academic to see what else he'd written, I discovered he'd published a book in 2000 titled, "Stations of the Cross; Adorno and the Christian Right." Hmmm. Have no idea who Theodor Adorno is (was), but this certainly sounds like a PhD thesis being shopped around for a bookshelf on which to gather dust. So I poked around in some book reviews and read some sections online. It's a "nuanced, dialectical study," apparently linking James Dobson, an American Christian psychologist who has a radio show, to a German anti-semite about whom Adorno wrote in 1943. Nuanced. Well, you bet! Isn't that a word for "no one knows what I'm talking about but me?"

I read Dobson when my kids were little. He was a voice of reason in the midst of all the hysterical academic child writers of the era who appeared on Phil Donahue and Merv Griffin. I was a Democrat at the time and pretty liberal on just about everything. Don't remember when Dobson got political, but I know Phil Donahue threw him in head first by muzzling him on air when he was a guest, and he decided he needed to go on the offensive.

Apostolidis, like many left wing academics, gets his shorts in a knot when Christians speak up about anything. They can't get it figured out that Christians aren't some sort of monolithic block--they can't agree on how or when to baptize, how many days or eons God took to create the world, what exactly did Jesus mean in the parables, or which version of end-times to promote. I've seen Christian websites where they listed all the modern heretics, and I think Billy Graham and James Dobson are both listed.

Apparently the conservative Christians didn't have all the power the U.S. socialist professors thought, because Republicans were roundly defeated in 2006, although I personally think it had nothing to do with religion, unless of course, your religion teaches you to tell the truth and not go on wild spending sprees with other people's money. Republicans were tossed out because they refused to be the conservatives they pretended to be when they ran for office. I'd hardly call George W. Bush a stellar conservative on immigration, would you? The only religious change that came out of that election is that the liberal Democrat candidates worked very hard to sound more interested in family values and the welfare of children. They learned to talk the talk. So if all the liberal posturing and publishing that has poured forth since Bush got in office (most of which is on my public library shelves) did nothing else, it at least was successful in turning the issue upside down, so maybe next time the Democrats will be tossed for pretending to be something they weren't.

At the moment, conservatives do "own" talk radio. But it is a competitive medium and liberals just haven't done well getting their ideas across and attracting sponsors. Liberals don't do well with facts--and feelings do better on TV (like Rosie saying absurd hateful things with a sneer) than on radio which is more a thinking medium. Most of the national conservative talk hosts don't do religion--they may occasionally mention it, but their audience is too varied to risk it. Dr. Laura is a Jew, Glenn Beck is a Mormon, Laura Ingraham is a Catholic (I think), and the other big names I don't know. And Dobson I'd call a pretty small fish in a big pond. Is that nuanced enough?