But even if you turn yourself into a human spam filter, there is a sense that a gale of sleaze is blowing through American life day and night. It’s like a rewrite of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s dystopian 1953 novel in which readers were hunted down and their books burned. Yes, you can hide, but eventually the scuzz squads will find you and erase your tiny Kindle Paperwhite.

The weapon of choice to survive this stuff has been satire (as oddly enough, was true during the Cold War in Eastern Europe, when the inescapable force was communist totalitarianism). Twitter satirists have had a field day with Justin Bieber, creating mock photos of his first DUI arrest—as a 5-year-old in a pedal car. They posted a photo of Miley Cyrus grinding onstage against Madonna, and next to it a photo of Miley as a normal little girl.

The postmodernists who can explain away anything would reassure us that this is all hardly different than the traveling freak shows of the 19th century, when simple curiosity made people pay to enter the tent and see P.T. Barnum’s “monkey man.” But that misses the new reality. The freak show left town for a year. Now it’s our daily bread. Adjusting ourselves to vulgarity on such a vast scale is like rust; eventually it is going to erode standards for pretty much everything. Even hard-to-shock entertainers were aghast at the content of the Miley Cyrus incident. Putting it on television makes moral baseness the new normal. At some point, even the devil gets grossed out.