America’s refusal to fund and sustain its intellectual and cultural heritage has come with an enormous cost. We are now paying the bill.

If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue.

A group of right-wing extremists would have the American public believe it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of a market society.

Young people the world over demonstrating against economic injustice are met with state-sanctioned violence and insults in the mainstream media, rather than informed dialogue, critical engagement and reformed policies.

C. Wright Mills, the radical Columbia University sociologist who died 50 years ago at age 45, warned that America was becoming a nation of "cheerful robots," corrupted by an economic elite and heading toward a third world war.

Staring open-mouthed at 17 in my Buddy Holly glasses, chinstrap beard, espresso-stained insides, putrid Chuck Taylors and newsprint-smudged fingertips, I wondered what had happened to the world into which I was hoping to enter so well rehearsed.In post-1950s America, an average person’s concept of what might be the meaning of life was more likely than at any other time in history to draw on a wide range of source material.