There is something rather interesting and revealing in all the recent controversies about celebrities running their mouths and acting like peabrains. You’ve heard about these controversies on the news, of course, such as Mel Gibson’s drunken diatribe against Jews, comedian Michael Richards’s racial slurs in response to being interrupted by a heckler during a disastrous nightclub comedy routine, Danny DeVito’s drunken rant against President Bush on The View yesterday, etc.

That’s the Omniculture for you. Everything happens, and everything gets on TV or the Web, which is the new TV.

In short, expect a lot more of this.

People often act badly under stress—which is when a person’s integrity and strength of character shine through or the lack of these bursts forth. And there will always be stressful situations to endure, even for the wealthy, famous, and powerful. Hence, there will be many incidents of crummy behavior by such persons. In a society with strong democratic and egalitarian impulses and consequently little to no sense of noblesse oblige among its most privileged members, such trashy behavior is inevitable.

Given that eveything happens in the Omniculture and is immediately distributed to everybody by way of TV and the Web, this will simply be the way of things for the foreseeable future: Big mouths saying and doing stupid things, and other big mouths complaining about what they said and did. There will be no escape, short of moving to a deserted island without TV or internet access.