STINKING TO HIGH HEAVEN

BRING BACK THE SENSE OF SHAME. RESTORE IT TO A place of honor. Give it the nicest office in the brain. It is not only social conservatives who urge it. By now, almost everyone agrees that shame is socially indispensable--the individual's internal police department. Without a barrier of protective shame, the raw sewage of the country's id (pornography, crime, a general violent rottenness and social stupidity) seeps upward, into the ego and superego. A kind of moral imbecility smells up the public places. Life in America begins to look like a long afternoon of shameless, aberration-of-the-day television talk shows, tacky and...