SAVING SNOOKI FROM TIGER WOODS AND INTEGRATION. Jesus God: No sooner had I waded through Maggie Gallagher's o tempora o mores than Jonah Goldberg sticks his fat thumb in, on the subject of reality shows. Like Gallagher, he starts with unobjectionable statements about the foolishness of the participants, and then gets to this:

The elite minority’s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs.

Holy shit.

As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls “ecumenical niceness.” A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass -- or people with underclass values -- are forbidden. A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.

So, because the elite minority made white men treat Negroes and women like equals, Jersey Shore is on TV and we all swear.

That would seem to be a climax of idiocy, but Goldberg must produce a few hundred more words before he can pretend this extended mouth-fart is a column. Where can he go from here? One imagines him at this point running his tiny mind through various exit strategies: Star Trek, FDR as Hitler, how great his dog is. Finally it hits him: double reverse class warfare!

Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the “proletarianization of the elites,” one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.

The question is: Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?

I'm not sure who he's worried about here. The dumbbells of Jersey Shore haven't suffered by following the loathsome example of Tiger Woods; before they or anyone else learned that Tiger Woods fucked around, they got a TV show. Oh, but they might have seen Paris Hilton, and that may have altered their lifestyle. Before she came along, mooks such as Snooki and Vinny refrained from profanity, and kept their pinkies extended when they chugged their Mojitos.

As usual, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.