I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life - you might want to - –when I read these to my students, they think it's Malcom X because it's so radical. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.

I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.