Candace de Russy has provided a nicely informative article about the uglier side of the Omniculture, in today’s edition of National Review Online. The American public square, de Russy notes, has been blitzed with what Gawker.com, a gossip website, calls “revulse-amusement” and misused for what columnist Andrea Peyser terms a “raunch-fest” — revelry calculated, according to the New York Times, to churn up waves of “ethical nausea.” After recounting some of the recent seamy media events, such as the O. J. Simpson book and Britney Spears’ unfathomable exploits in public exhibitionism, de Russy notes that many of these occurrences are manifestations of publicity schemes pandering to the American public’s "apparently boundless public appetite for debased and scabrous material." But they are also more, she observes. De Russy aptly cites Temple University humanities professor Noel Carroll’s observation of a "tolerance of boundary breaking," or as de Russy puts it, "the increasingly nonchalant acceptance of the violation of what were once accepted as the common standards of decency," which de Russy describes as ever-increasing. Seeking the social meaning behind the trend, de Russy writes: Janice Irvine, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, interprets this tolerance as a kind

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