On "Larry King Live" the other night, Walter Cronkite said that average Americans today are so poorly educated that our society lacks a fundamental requirement for democracy (informed citizens). And in his October "Notebook" column, Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham writes, "What passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals, across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges."
So what do you think? Was H.L. Mencken correct in portraying the majority of Americans as a vast collection of "boobs and yokels" -- who don't get it and who never will?