By Mark Greif, from Against Everything, a collection of his essays that will be published in September by Pantheon. Greif is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man and is a founding editor of n+1.

Reality television over the recent decade has shown a United States of people selling one another, in the form of a vast trade in junk, the last remains of our patrimony. The past has become no more than the chance that something in the attic will be valuable to a rich buyer. PBS — our largest provider of public television, putatively the…