A generation in crisis?

I drove home last night with a cab driver who was outspokenly horrified by TV shows these days. Despite his avowed disgust he could tell me in detail what all of them were about. And I could admit I knew what he was talking about.
I got the excerpt below from a piece in The Guardian here. It says a lot about the kind of TV we make in Romania and also about the kind of newspaper writing we do, because, when, if ever, have you read a newspaper piece which started from a trivial story and ended with a reflection on the makings of modern broadcasting - going though Mailer, Roth and back?

"Mailer, writing in the 1970s, regarded TV as a modern contaminant, as toxic to his system as "the faces of digital watches, ... the touch of polyester shirts, the wet wax-paper of McDonald's hamburgers, the air of summer when traffic jams, and shrieks of stereo as the volume is mislaid, the little nausea that plastic highball glasses will give to the resonance of booze". The title of his essay "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots" encapsulated his attitude to television and all he felt it had come to represent."

And reading this, I wondered what kind of people we are turning into.