It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

In a society that has very high concentration of capital in a narrow sector of the population, that's going to influence everything in different ways.

Naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk... It's as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.'

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term "intellectual" should act in the manner that [ Edward] Said prescribes, that's another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.