If you type the phrase “vast wasteland” as a search engine prompt, then you will receive around 90 hits that all orbit around a speech given more than 40 years ago.

Its author, Newton Minnow, was John F. Kennedy’s appointment as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the body that (along with the market) regulates the quality of television.

“I invite you to sit down in front of your television,” Minnow wrote, “and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

It’s a speech whose key phrase ranks with Eisenhower’s warning about the growth of the “military-industrial complex,” another warning that resonates louder all the time.

Every once in a while a brave adult soul takes Minnow up on his challenge and watches television for an extended period of time. Bill McKibben (“The Age of missing Information”) and Neil Postman (“Amusing Ourselves to Death”) wrote serious books about the experience.

They came to serious conclusions, all of them bad.

I’ve had a taste of the experience while recovering from surgery, though I was selective and watched mostly news channels, it not being baseball season yet.

My experience began two days after surgery. Still full of painkillers, I found myself apparently hallucinating while trapped in a vortex of strange and surreal images.

I was about to buzz the nurse for different meds when I realized that what I took to be an extended hallucination had been Michael Jackson’s arraignment on child molestation charges, complete with large numbers of trucked in adoring fans, Nation of Islam bodyguards, six dozen assorted cops, and a documentary film crew that was busy filming the network people who were filming them.

Who could know that the strangeness of the moment would be trumped (or Trumped, since has a show, too) by Jackson’s sister’s Super Bowl halftime “malfunction” or by the Martha Stewart trial? (You know the moral of that trial. We won’t charge Ken Lay, who stole billions, but we will catch someone who avoided losing $51,000.)

Throw in the Lacey Peterson murder trial and Kobe Bryant’s trial for sexual assault, and MSNBC and CNN have become adjuncts to Court TV.

And who would have predicted that the Super Bowl incident would become the most searched event on Google and Linex within the last five years-more than hanging chads, the cloning of embryos, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Palestinian problem, to think of a few items that might have merited investigation by people who want to know.

Of course, P. T. Barnum, the Circus impresario, would have known what was going on.

“No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of Americans,” he once said, and he should have known what he was talking about given that he provided Americans with a running freak show that was unmatched until television.

Maybe Nero would have known what was going on, as well, what with his emphasis on “bread and circuses” as public distractors.

Or maybe William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the yellow journalism guys, would have known.

The motion picture production code of the 1930s, a famous moralizing document, once required that nothing be shown in a movie that contributed to lowering the moral level of the audience. (That takes care of most drama, I imagine.)

Maybe the same expectation should be placed on the news.

Larry Rogers is an Associate Professor of Education and regular contributor to “Faculty Corner.” Comments on “Faculty Corner” submissions may be directed to the Collegian editorial staff at sdsucollegian@yahoo.com.

Since I teach social studies methods, I kid myself that anything that I read about that pops up in the news is somehow job-related. In this spirit, I read last week that Idi Amin had died.

He wasn’t a loss, having caused significant harm to large numbers of people during his misrule of Uganda, but his death made me think how geography and history intersect to make the world worse than it has to be.

Uganda, which once belonged (in the power sense, not the moral) to Great Britain, was once almost the solution to one of Great Britain’s other problems, for the British (I almost typed “brutish”) also controlled (or longed for control of) a growing part of the Middle East (a term, by the way, that was invented by an American admiral, not a Middle eastern person).

Led by Theodore Herzl and, later, Chaim Weizmann, Zionist organizations sprung up in the late 19th century. They advocated a Jewish return to the holy lands, a desire that was complicated by the fact that the lands in question were holy to several sets of people.

The Zionists especially pressured the British government to support their desires.

This pressure resulted in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised that a Jewish national homeland would be created in Palestine. As significant as the Balfour declaration was, that’s not my focus here.

My focus is on what the British tried to do years earlier. They tried to convince the Zionists to accept Uganda as a national homeland. The offer was quite expedient.

The British controlled Uganda, but didn’t value it much. They didn’t yet control the part of the Middle East that we know as Syria and Palestine, but could see the future value of it to them.

The Zionists refused to accept Uganda, pointing out that their ancient history hadn’t occurred in central Africa, but on the eastern Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, the Ugandans didn’t have a voice in the discussion.

Almost twenty years later, the British, having accepted reluctantly a Zionist presence in Palestine, and seeing significant problems in its future, offered the area to the United States as a mandate under the League of Nations. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, had the good sense to decline the offer, though I wonder what would have come of acceptance.

Not surprisingly, neither the Zionists nor the existing Palestinian Arab population had a voice in the discussion.

So what’s my point? Governments frequently make offers to other governments or NGOs or pressure groups out of expedience, not out of principle. Other people years later live lives that are worse or shorter than they have to be because of those unprincipled decisions.

We rarely learn about such decisions in high school. If we do, we learn about them in passing as one or two of a steady stream of unconnected factoids, which means that they bounce off us.

Although I wonder how many Americans can identify Idi Amin, I wonder more about how many Americans can describe adequately the nature of big power promises in the course of even the last century. It is the spirit of the two British promises about Uganda and Palestine that seems to sum up the complications of our world.

The road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with selfish ones.

Shakespeare, in one of his history plays, had King Henry IV give advice to his heir, Henry V. When the people complain about the quality of your rule, he argued, arrange to have their “giddy minds” be occupied with foreign quarrels. Then they will be distracted and you can do what you please.

Charles Beard, the great progressive American historian, wrote an article for Scribner’s magazine in February of 1935. Beard called the article “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels.”

Beard argued in an archly ironic way that the United States had missed innumerable opportunities to interfere in the affairs of other nations. His list of missed opportunities went on for five pages and included enough examples of almost unknown events that it clearly functioned as satirical in intent.

Or did it? Maybe Beard meant to say that we shouldn’t have intervened where and when we did, much less in other places and times. He also observed that “confronted by the difficulties of a deepening domestic crisis and by the comparative ease of a foreign war, what will President Roosevelt do? Judging by the history of American politicians, he will choose the latter.”

So what do we do about assumptions like those made by Beard? Was Beard right about Roosevelt (and his predecessors)? Does what he said apply to today’s choices? Is it unpatriotic to suppose that it does apply? Is it vaguely totalitarian to suppose that making the connection makes one disloyal? Can we have a civil conversation in this country about the responsibilities and limits of American power and interests?

What does the American public think? Or, better, what does the “American street” think-a usage that parallels journalists’ generalizations about the Arab “street.”

Polls about the American public’s attitude toward war with Iraq are interesting. People repeatedly say (by a margin of two to one) that they were not given enough information to make a judgment about the decision to go to war. They also repeatedly say (by the same margin) that they back the administration that failed to make the case for war in a compelling manner.

In effect, they back the decision to go to war because that’s what administrations get to do. There are limits, of course. “Time” contains a CNN/ Gallup poll that considers how many casualties Americans are willing to absorb to change the government in Iraq.

If journalism is the first draft of history, what are opinion polls? Maybe we’ll know in a few weeks, unless we’re too giddy to know the difference between opinion and reality.

One of the advantages of being a military veteran, by the way, is that I paid my dues as a question-asker.

Larry Rogers is an associate professor of education and a veteran of the Vietnam War. Write him at larry_rogers@sdstate.edu

John Miller wrote a column a couple of weeks ago emphasizing the importance of reading.

It triggered a response in me, but then I’m a compulsive reader.

Days that I don’t get to read are wasted days.

Days filled with meetings often feel wasted in that way, though smuggling reading material into a meeting is almost as useful a skill as escaping from the meeting in the first place.

A lot of people who like to read don’t have control over the urge. Anything is short-term fodder for their reading impulses.

Some people are so far gone that they have read the notices that most people happily ignore in elevators?the ones that let you know how much weight the elevator car can carry, plus fascinating bits about relevant state and federal laws governing elevator use.

They’ve also read the tags on the ends of mattresses?the ones that say you can’t remove them under penalty of law. I think the warnings are aimed at retailers, but I thought them to be real legal threats the day I first tore one off a mattress.

Of course, I also believed that the nuns in my school carried guns in what I later found out were pen and pencil holsters.

That’s not the worst thing a kid can believe. My sister-in-law once believed that cheese was excreted by mice and refused to eat it.

It was a good deal for her siblings, but socially paralyzing once she got to school, I suppose.

Since she lives in Wisconsin, home of the cheeseheads, it still may be a problem.

Compulsive readers read what’s written on the backs of cereal boxes: ingredients, nutritional values and special mail-in offers.

Compulsive readers aside, it’s clear that reading is a survival skill that faces significant challenges in our culture. I’ll give you three bits of evidence to support that belief.

First, the amount read by students decreases by one-half between early elementary school and late middle school.

Second, the average American reads less than three books a year. Since a statistically disproportionate amount of reading, as reported by booksellers and librarians, is done by women, the average male may be lucky to read what’s on the cereal box.

Third, the average social studies teacher (teacher!) reads less than two books a year (but many watch a lot of game footage).

A fourth bit of evidence might be the ratio between money spent at the coffee bar at Barnes & Noble and that spent on books.

I’ll research that.

I would bet that it’s dead even.

What are the implications of this for our culture as we stand poised to make significant decisions in the world arena?

We’ll see next time.

Larry Rogers is an associate professor of education. Write him at larry_rogers@sdstate.edu

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