The end of decency has been proclaimed over and over again throughout the 20th century. There's no way to pin down just when that line was crossed, but in public discourse it was crossed long ago. The last week or two are testimony to that. The slow death of the newspaper has not put an end to the tabloid spectacle. Instead it universalized it. Self-degradation turns into a public media orgy, in which all the participants, the promoters, the reporters and finally the readers become degraded. One man walks away completely disgraced from Weinergate, but all of us have been degraded in the process.
