America has become a conservative country and will probably remain so for at least one more generation. This has happened because the Republican Party has colonized not only Iraq but also the minds of an entire generation of Americans. The conservative paradigm about patriotism and manifest destiny in the Middle East has wheedled its way into the brains of people who are most susceptible to insipid slogans and sound bites, namely teenagers whose still developing brains somehow subsist on a steady diet of sugar, nicotine, draft beer and FOX's persistent and unapologetic harangues about milquetoast liberals and fags.

I teach English to college freshman, and I find that there is something rather unsettling about walking into a classroom on the first day of the fall semester only to be greeted by the suspicious and often openly hostile stares of the well-scrubbed, neatly dressed, middle-class boys and girls of middling intellects, many of whom have been indoctrinated by their conservative parents to believe that there is nothing to be gained from a university education except a diploma and a connection or two that might come in handy later on in the business world. Instead of giving their children the conventional advice about sex, alcohol, grades, and so on, parents in ever increasing numbers tell their sons and daughters to never let their guards down while listening to the left-wing tirades of their crackpot instructors. And remember, Jesus loves you.

Sometimes, while trying to lead a class discussion about the day's news (perhaps I'll ask students to read an editor ial about the alleged atrocities at Guantanamo Bay or an article about suicide bombers in Baghdad) I am often startled by the boredom and complacency I see-lots of yawns, loud sighs, an occasional smirk of contempt-all of which suggests to me that the war in Iraq is simply not on their radar. This complete and utter lack of interest in the outside world has led me to the conclusion that every college in America has become a sort of intellectual Lord of the Flies where, instead of brandishing spears and conch shells on some hellish tropical island, students traverse the intellectual wasteland of campus life armed with iPods, condoms, and bottles of swill.

With the exception of the iPods, perhaps not much has changed over the years, but I would posit that college kids a generation ago had at least a modicum of intellectual curiosity. I was a college freshman when the first Gulf War broke out, and despite taunts of cowardice and treason, more than a few of my friends began singing "O Canada" whenever they heard whispers of a draft. No one I knew had any interest in participating in a war orchestrated by a Bush family member, and we spent many hours discussing our views. While I get the impression that kids today are not very interested or concerned about the continuing saga of the Gulf War, they nevertheless seem prepared to march into the blistering deserts of Iraq to fight roadside bombers if their undaunted leader asks them to do so.

This is happening, I repeat, because the Republican Party has done an exemplary job of colonizing the minds of today's young people. In her latest book Dark Age Ahead , Canadian author and thinker par excellence Jane Jacobs believes the United States, and indeed all of North America, is perilously close to suffering from a disease that she calls "cultural amnesia." What happens, Jacobs asks, when an entire generation forgets how to do important things for itself because it has never been taught how to do those things? We can, for example, see this happening in the industrial sector where jobs that demand skilled labor are being shipped overseas in ever-greater numbers. In as little as fifty years no one in North America will know how to make steel or build a car or repair a boiler. This concept of "cultural amnesia" can be taken one step further. What happens when people no longer know how to think critically and independently? What happens when everyone is told what to think and how to respond to a political crisis thanks to the miracles of our so-called information age? Children enrolled in today's secondary schools and universities, Jacobs believes, are receiving an accreditation, not an education, as it is commonly defined.

Kids don't need answers to their questions because it never occurred to them to ask questions in the first place. If only I could talk to them about Lord of the Flies .ah, but most have never heard of the book much less read it. The same holds true for Orwell's 1984 , Atwood's Handmaid's Tale , Huxley's Brave New World , J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and dozens of other classics of post-apocalyptic totalitarianism. Some people might find this claim rather improbable until they joined me in the classroom and saw for themselves the blank stares as I read through my list. In fact, I've had many students who, after submitting their first papers, docilely approached my desk and confessed to never having written a single research paper in high school. Many seem to have received no "education" at all; that is, they lack the ability to think critically and to analyze complex ideas in a logical manner. They crave easy answers, slogans, sound bites, and the comfort of clichés.

In his essay "Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why," John Taylor Gatto, a former New York City educator and contributor to Harper's , claims that today's public education system is merely a vast assembly line that mass-produces mindless drones who are taught to conform to the rules and directives of their corporate paymasters. Intractable conservatives believe that education is a means to an end. In this case, the "end" (at least for the ownership class) is to create obedient worker bees that will man the gray cubicles of post-industrial America and attend to all of those menial tasks--programming computers, answering phones, cooking the books. The kids I meet seem oblivious to this possibility. When asked what they want to study in college, many students simply shrug and say, "I don't know. As long as I get a job that pays six figures when I graduate." Little do they know what's in store for them. Soon their brains will have the look, taste and consistency of Soylent Green.

Evidence of this menacing assembly line mentality can be seen everywhere. Flipping through the channels one evening I paused on FOX News (call this a form of self-flagellation, if you like; a reminder of my days as a budding agnostic trapped in a Catholic schoolroom) and cringed in horror as Bill O'Reilly shouted at a college professor who was trying, unsuccessfully of course, to defend the importance of a liberal arts curriculum. While jabbing his finger and bobbing his head back and forth with all the menace of a king cobra, O'Reilly raged on and on that a university education should be strictly vocational. If some kid from Cleveland wants to become a salesman for a pharmaceuticals company then he shouldn't have to bother with idiotic classes in African history and feminist literature.

Like survivors of a nuclear holocaust hunkered down in their bomb shelters, many Gen Xers (of which I am a member) huddle together in gloomy cafes to console one another about the wildly shrieking ideologues who live aboveground and are slowly and inexorably taking over the country, people like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and the utterly improbable nerd extraordinaire Tucker Carlson. You might even call this scenario a latter day Invasion of the Body Snatchers except this plot involves Machiavellian talking heads who gleefully infect vacant-eyed TV addicts with ever more virulent forms of intellectual apathy. For I no longer have any doubts that these conservative talk show hosts are little more than clever con artists reading meticulously crafted scripts that sound more liturgical than political in nature. Like their televangelist counterparts, these political pundits don't believe a single word of what they're saying, but as long as those paychecks arrive each week they'll continue to spout their ludicrous rhetoric.

The problem, of course, is that their venomous words have transcended mere rhetoric and have taken on the dimensions and power of ritual, a new religion that has converted millions of apostles to a sickening form of fanaticism. Only "cultural amnesia" can account for the willingness on the part of the general public to blindly accept the moronic platitudes of these talking heads. Too many people have lost the ability to think critically. Who knows? Perhaps they never possessed the ability in the first place.

Thankfully, as any student of history knows (or maybe doesn't know but will soon find out), colonialism doesn't work. It never has. And American voters, perhaps sensing this, came awfully close to achieving the critical mass necessary to send the conservatives packing. Progressives may achieve their aims yet, but until then this cultish conservative behavior may continue to spread to an entire generation of young people, happy consumers one and all, who show remarkably little aptitude for separating fantasy from reality and who can no longer see beyond the cloying smokescreen of corporate culture and its army of media savvy proselytizers.