Tuesday, June 11, 1985
Page 4
The Nebraskan
Temporary
surcharge a
yevil
In November of last year Deb Chappell, exec
utive director of the Nebraska State Student
Association, said "It is simply unrealistic to
believe that students and their families can pay
much more.
She was referring to relying on higher tuition
rates to help fund Nebraska's higher education
system.
However, after Saturday's Board of Regents
meeting students are going to Be asked to pay
more.
The Regents approved a 5 percent tuition
surcharge for 1985-86 for undergraduate and
graduate programs and a 10 percent surcharge
for professional programs.
This surcharge is in addition to the 10 percent
base tuition increase for the '85-86 school year.
The surcharge is not a permanent increase.
Broken down, this means that a resident
undergraduate student will pay $2 more per
credit hour with the surcharge than that student
would have paid without the surcharge.
It is projected that $1,936,000 of revenue will
be generated by the tuition surcharge: $1,193,000
from UNL, $463,000 from UNO, and $280,000 from
UNMC.
No student likes to see an increase in tuition,
or anything else they have to pay out, the same
way citizens cringe at tax increases. However,
we're faced with either an increase in tuition or a
decrease in UNL programs and services.
In this light, we support the surcharge as a
necessary evil in hard economic times for the
university.
Each year the university is asked by the state
legislature to make further and further cuts,
professors are told that salary increases won't be
forthcoming, and we notice a few more buildings
that need paint or a few more busted water
fountains in need of repair because of lack of
money.
A student carrying 12 credit hours will be
asked to pay $24 more per semester than he
would have had to pay without the surcharge.
When faced with the alternatives, that is not a
heavy price to pay.
Hopefully, a few less dollars in our pockets
now will mean a better education in the long run.
However, there is one aspect of this issue that
we hope the Regents reconsider. The money gen
erated for the surcharge is going into a collected
fund for UNL, UNO and UNMC. UNL will obviously,
because of size, provide the lion's share of that
increased revenue ($1,1 93,000 of $ 1 ,936,000), yet
the money could be divided equally between all
campuses.
UNL students are willing to tighten belts and
loosen their purse strings to help the ol' alma
mater, but must we also provide a disproportion
ate amount for the other schools in the NU
system? We hope not.
The money from the UNL portion of the sur
charge should go only to the UNL budget.
At the same time we would encourage the
Board of Regents and NU administration to con
tinue with renewed vigor the search for alterna
tive ways to increase revenue or make cuts with
out sacrificing needed programs at UNL.
Students will eventually reach a point where
they can't pay for their education. Tuition sur
charges should be a last ditch effort to keep the
system going and not an easy way out for the
budget makers.
N The I
epraslcan
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X f WAP06S, T -0' Mk.
319
NaUidOTi Weir etaireked.
Commercialism warps meaning of religion
America is one of the most churched nations
in the world. Public opinion polls continue
to indicate that on a number of traditional
"religious" indices (e.g., church attendance,
quality of prayers offered, belief in God and etc.)
the United States is the most religious of the
Western nations. Only in the Far East and Africa
does the popularity of religion reach the heights
which it does in this nation.
Jim
Rogers
However, in spite of its apparent popularity,
there are nagging doubts as to the depth of the
veracity of our professed commitment. The same
opinion polls which report the popularity of reli
gion in America also report that outside of insti
tutional commitment, the moral and doctrinal
elements of the institutions are quite ignored by
the "faithful."
Religious commentator Richard Quebedeaux
similarly observes in a recent book on the rise of
personality cults in American Christianity that
"when we examine the 'structure of reality' reli
gion gives to life in modern America, it is manif
estly apparent that much of contemporary reli
gion especially popular religion is super
ficial, only skin deep . . . (I)ts 'products' are seen
to be almost entirely for me, for my family and
friends, and for my kind of people. Its therapeu
tic approach to self-awareness . . . produces a de
facto self-centeredness that results in an almost
to'al lack of deep fulfilling relationships."
In his now famous Harvard commencement
address, Alexander Solzhenitsyn succinctly
argued that at root the "similarity of the dis
ease" between the Marxist and free worlds
namely the deprivation of both our cultures'
spiritual live is more frightening than the .
apparent division between the two ideological
camps.
Running through both Quebedeaux's and
Solzhenitsyn's critiques of American Christian
ity, like the proverbial scarlet thread, is the
notion that the modern metaphor of commercial
ism has captured religious institutions and the
Christian message to the extent that the authen
ticity of the message and the religious expe
rience has been seriously compromised.
A survey of the message broadcast over the
airwaves seems to confirm this observation. In
spite of the apparent aura of godliness which
surrounds the electronic preachers (most nota
bly Schuller and his "Crystal Cathedral"), the
provision of products to be consumed and the
hedonism this type of provision implies is at the
root of these broadcasts. The message of the
broadcasters "mentalizes" sin so that mere
acquiescence to the message is posited as the
primary interest which God has in the transac
tion. (Witness most clearly Schuller's grotesque
"possibility thinking.") The believer is not chal
lenged after all, negativism does not sell.
Hence, the message reeks of secularism and
egoism it is at its core fundamentally
apostate.
Though ostensibly serving the Godhead,
America's Christianity is by and large an exer
cise in narcissism. Solzhenitsyn appropriately
noted that our age is at a turning point today: "If
the world has not approached its end, it has
reached a major watershed in history, equal in
importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spirit
ual blaze, we shall have to rise to a new height of
vision, to a new level of life where our physical
nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages,
but, even more importantly, our spiritual being
will not be trampled upon as in the Modern Era."
'Rambo 9 rewrites the Vietnam War
N"No man, no law, no war can stop . . .
Rambo," says the two-page ad in Var
iety. That's for sure. The ad goes on to
proclaim the new Sylvester Stallone movie a gold
mine. In its first six days it took in $32,548,362
and was being shown in a record 2,074 theaters.
Rambo is a monster hit.
Richard
tP Cohen
It is also monstrous. It says, among other
things, that the government sold out the soldiers
it sent to Vietnam, sold them out again when
they came home, knows that American prisoners
remain in Vietnam and, what's worse, does not
care. The villains come right out of a Ronald
Reagan speech: communists and Washington
bureaucrats. The former are curel and evil while
the later are merely cruel and indifferent.
There are two things you can do with a
phenomenon such as Rambo. You can call it a
mere movie and ignore it or you can call it a
cultural phenomenon and wonder what it all
means. Since the mere movies Clint Eastwood
once made are now touted as the precursors of
resurgent conservatism, it is probably wise to
look deep in the mournful eyes of Sly Stallone
and ask what he's selling that so many seem to
be buying. It's more than action; it's reaction
a revisionist history of the Vietnam War, com
plete with a stab-in-the-back theory.
In the movie, Vietnam was lost on the home
front. Politicians and bureaucrats conspired to
cripple the war effort as they now conspire to
ignore American POWs still supposedly being
held by the Vietnamese. If you need a rationale
for why the Vietnamese would continue to hold
Americans, the movie provides it: They are evil,
but not as evil as the Russians who are as it is
said the focus of all evil. In this movie,
though, their focus is distinctly limited. Mostly,
they torture Stallone until he manages to free
himself. Then, armed with a cross bow with the
throw weight of an MX missile, he kills every last
one of them.
What's ominous about Rambo is that several
million people have already seen the movie and
have, presumably, liked it. They probably accept
or have no serious argument with the proposition
that the Russians and their flunkies, the Viet
namese, are as irrationally evil as communists
were once supposed to be. In fact, the Vietna
mese themselves are caricatures out of 1960s
anti-communist propaganda. They are flunkies
of the Russians and their cause is neither anti
colonialism, nationalism or even imperalism but
raw evil. Stallone's revisionism makes no allow
ance for anything we've learned since 1965 not
even the welcome the "Today Show" got in Ho
Chi Minh City.
Historical revisionism is sometimes more
than mere academic interest. That was the case
with Germany after World War I and it may be the
case now with us. Just as German reactionaries
itched to refight a war they thought had been
lost on the home front, some elements here seem
to think that Vietnam is worth repeating if
only to get it right this time.
While that attitude is not entirely the impulse
behind the Reagan administration's Nicaragua
policy, it is hardly a brake on it. In fact, there is
little in "Rambo" with which Reagan would
differ. Like Rambo, he finds the same enemies
both here and abroad and, like Rambo, he seems
to have learned only one lesson from the Vietnam
experience: If he's going to fight, he's going to
fight to win.
The most dangerous assertion in the current
wave of revisionism whose text is Richard Nix
on's latest book is that the Vietnam War could
have been won and that transplanted to Nica
ragua it could be, if only by our proxies. Nicara
gua is not Vietnam but neither is it Grenada
There is no reason to believe the contras could
conquer the country and every reason to believe
the United States can. But then just like the
Russians in Afghanistan, we would have to fight
continuously to hold it. We would need a whole
new movement in Washington for the names of
those killed in Nicaragua.
Life is no movie, but lately the two are often
confused. Pictures of Stallone as Rambo grace
the cover of magazines such as Soldier of For
tune, which celebrates the movie as the long
awaited response to "Hollywood liberals." Rambo
himself seems to sense that times have changed.
"Sir, this time can we win?" he asks, and when
told "yes" goes off to war with the expression
Lassie reserved for little boys. As the ad says, no
man no law and no war can stop Rambo. Not even
the lessons of history particularly when
they're rewritten.
1985, The Washington Post Company