As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

I mean, the people who got us into these crises - whether we're talking about the bankers or the hedge fund managers, or we're talking about the IMF - it's become pretty clear that the price to be paid for their illegal financial shenanigans, the burden is being placed on working class people, on the poor, on the elderly, on young people. It's become clear that neoliberal policies aren't just interested in "solving" an economic crisis, these are policies designed to enrich corporations and bankers and the rich at the expense of everybody else.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.

The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed.

There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.

We have in this country something remarkable. We have the local version of the Soviets' Pravda. It trades in ignorance and lies and opinions, and makes the claim that they are "truth," and it does so with people who are stupid, who don't know anything, and are basically entertainers. It merges a fundamentalist ideology with celebrity culture.