President Kennedy’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was an attorney by the name of Newton Minow.  I noticed that Mr. Minow passed away earlier this year.  Minow surveyed the content being broadcast on television in 1961, and was not pleased.  He’s best known for a challenge he made to TV executives, in which he urged them to sit down and watch their stations for a full day, “without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you.”  “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.  You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending.”  I think we all can agree that, in the intervening 62 years, TV has only gotten worse.  In 1961 TV was an uncomplicated medium.  In the New York market, where I grew up, we had access to the greatest number of TV stations.  That number was 7.  That’s right, 7 different channels to choose from.  And better yet, we got to watch them on a grainy 19 inch (or smaller) black and white screen, on which the picture periodically jumped, rolled, or disappeared, necessitating the manipulation of rabbit-ear antennae.  We thought it was magical.  Now, I have hundreds of channels, broadcast in high definition, plus untold numbers of streaming services, and there’s still little content worth watching.  One of my many misapprehensions about the state of the world in general is the mistaken notion that, as the decades passed, Man would grow gradually more civilized.  There’s no evidence of that.  Quite the opposite.  The recent events in the Mideast, and the rampant violence in our own country lead one to the inevitable conclusion that the basic nature of Man has advanced little over the years.  For all the technological advancement, Man has simply traded his club in for nuclear weapons.  And television, in what some have called the Information Age, is less informative, and more mindless, banal, sadistic, violent, and offensive than it was when Minow panned it so long ago.  It’s really remarkable.  Newton Minow complained about 1960’s game shows, some of which were pretty silly.  Who could have predicted that in 2023, there would be a Game Show Network, dedicated to rerunning 60 year old games?  You’d have thought that today’s Woke leftist imbeciles would have cancelled game shows by now.  Games are contests, after all, and these are the same people who don’t let their children keep score in their games, lest little Johnny suffer a fatal blow to his inflated sense of self-worth.  The Left may reject the concept of winners and losers, but it occurred to me that just about everything on the air in our current Vast Wasteland has been turned into a game show.  There used to be cooking shows, where the hosts actually taught you how to cook.  Now every cooking show is a contest: Holiday Baking Challenge; Beat Bobby Flay; Chopped; and so on.  What’s the point of a cooking show where four strangers, using a strange kitchen, and limited ingredients, race to see who can make something edible in 15 minutes?  Nothing is learned, and then you’re one hour closer to death.  The History Channel used to air shows about actual history.  Not anymore.  Now, it has shows about lumberjacks and trucks driving on ice.  Instead of the shows about the history of weapons, there’s one where contestants vie to forge swords.  It’s a history game show.  But why?  Remember Minow’s complaint about formula comedies about unbelievable families?  The lack of imagination in Hollywood has led television producers to recycle the same sitcoms, again and again, with the same lame, tired situations.  Given current standards, The Beverly Hillbillies represented the height of culture.  And don’t get me started on the level of violence.  In the past, travel shows highlighted interesting locations.  Today, it’s The Amazing Race, where groups of annoying, insufferable people rush past all scenic and cultural sites to get the next clue, all in pursuit of the almighty dollar.  Travel used to be broadening.  Now it’s just another game show.  From the beginning of TV, there were soap operas on the air.  But now, even this genre has become a mindless contest, witness The Bachelor; The Bachelorette; and so on, ad infinitum, until you want to retch.  Romance is now another game show, only now so vulgar and graphic that even Jim Lange (The Dating Game) would blush.  Finally, remember the variety shows that used to be on TV?  Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin, and many others would host the biggest names in entertainment on a weekly basis.  Now, the most popular performers wouldn’t be caught dead on TV; not when their world tours bring in billions of dollars.  As a substitute for real talent, we have been given dozens of amateur hour contests, starting with American Idol, which wasn’t half bad, and devolving to such spectacles as The Voice, You Think You Can Dance, and an all-time low, The Masked Singer.  I regularly ask the rhetorical question, “Who watches this crap?”  But somebody must be watching it, because it keeps coming back.  I can only conclude that our society has devolved in the past 60 years.  In 1961, Newton Minow was speaking for the literate Americans of the day, who were being served what was decent programming, but who felt TV could provide more than it was offering.  The early programming must have been good, because people are now paying streaming companies to access decades-old reruns.  The difference is that the current crop of TV crap is being served to generations of dumbed-down, self-absorbed, semi-illiterates, many of whom, sadly enough, have gone to college.  This class of people, to whom the late writer Jean Shepard referred as Slobus Americanus, willingly consume this tripe, complete with an even greater number of screaming, cajoling, and offensive endless commercials, because they just don’t know any better.  They tolerate human waste on their streets, so why not broadcast waste on the screen.  Sad to say, television continues to be a Vast Wasteland.  The difference is that today’s viewers are content to watch the mindless sewage, as long as they can do so on an 82 inch screen.