“Is plastic OK?”

That’s what the poke stuffer — or whatever the heck they call bagboys these days — asks me every time I wheel my cart into the checkout counter at the grocery store.

“Yeah,” I answer mechanically, “plastic is fine.” Then I smile.

What I’m recalling is a snippet of dialog from the 1968 film “The Graduate,” in which the main character, Benjamin, is taken aside by one of his father’s friends who is eager to offer profound advice:

Mr. McGuire: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word.”

Benjamin: “Yes, sir.”

Mr. McGuire: “Are you listening?”

Benjamin: “Yes, I am.”

Mr. McGuire: “Plastics. ...”

Safe at home, I nuke my honey-roasted pork Lean Cuisine and turn on the CBS Evening News, which, these days, is like watching, as the old song says, a buffalo singing the dinosaur blues. Then I check out a little network television.

Newton Minow can afford be to mighty proud. With a few possible exceptions, television is a much vaster wasteland than it was when he made his initial assessment 45 years ago. What’s worse is that the boob-tube (there’s a little hyphenated noun that has taken on a completely new meaning) offers us an opportunity to look ourselves directly in the eye. And what I see and hear makes us uneasy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about all programming. And the rascals who conjure up television fare are merely serving us what we eat. What I'm complaining about is us — and how television has taught us to be different than we are.

These days, every Dick, Jane and Sally has become a potential television personality. Stick a video camera in somebody’s face and the light-switch smile clicks on and the inanities come spewing forth. All our lives we’re in training for our 15 minutes of infamy.

Nowhere is this more evident than on reality teleivision. Forget that these programs encourage betrayal — betrayal is, after all, the thing most obsessively wrong with the world. But how is it that common, ordinary (excuse the redundancy) people have become so slick, so media savvy, so consistently disingenuous? So completely plastic?

If I were a foreigner watching American television, I’d never set foot in a country so chockfull of phonies. After digesting a few moments of “Trading Spaces,” “Dr. Phil,” “Survivor,” “Blind Date,” “The Amazing Race,” “Jerry Springer,” “The Anna Nicole Show,” “The Apprentice,” “Junkyard Wars,” “Changing Rooms,” “Judge Judy,” or the disgusting “Fear Factor” (they eat roaches and worse), the rest of the world must wonder if there are 10 authentic human beings left on the North American continent.

The supposedly regular folk who appear on these programs have all the gestures, all the affectations, all the superfluous flamboyance of Pee-wee Herman in his heyday.

Time was when I complained about my fellow Southerners. They would appear on the television news after a tornado had flattened their doublewide and proceed to chew up American English. “Hit’ll be thare. Ain’t no damn daug’ll tuch it. It’s done all toured up. I can tell you what, it done sounded lick a durned fright train….”

But these days, laid-back yokels are my heroes. They say exactly what they think, and they don’t phrase it in televisionese. They remain as awkwardly original as they ever were.

The Hollywood brains who have identified this new breed of specious, reality-crazed American have stumbled upon the perfect formula. No more expensive scriptwriters, no more pricey, temperamental actors, no more convoluted plots, no more hackneyed jokes. And there’s no need to suspend a viewer’s disbelief. Just stick a bunch of television-habituated morons in front of a camera and they’re instantly transformed into fakers who are jerkier than the ones in “The Graduate.”

Like poor Benjamin, I’m a little worried about our future:

Mr. McGuire: “Plastics.”

Benjamin: “Exactly how do you mean?”

Mr. McGuire: “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”

Benjamin: “Yes I will.”

Mr. McGuire: “Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.”