In Your Face With Lousy Taste : A wise guy in blackface. A potty-mouth radio star with a bestseller. Is this the end of civilization?

T aste? How about a well-known Anglo actor--who happens to be romantically involved with a well-known African- American actress--made up in blackface, in public, in what was supposed to be a gesture of humor?

Taste?

Well, there’s radio personality Howard Stern, near-naked on the cover of his new book “Private Parts,” boasting about the size of his most private part.

Or comedian Jackie Mason, unabashedly using a Yiddish racial pejorative to describe a black politician, New York Mayor David Dinkins.

Or developer Donald Trump, naming his new daughter in honor of a jewelry store that had ceded its air rights so he could build Trump Tower.

Taste?

Are we missing something here? In an era when performers and others with a desire to shock can deliver their messages nationally--even globally--in an instant, has tastelessness replaced baseball as the national pastime?

Not even scholars who study this stuff for a living agree.

“I’m not sure I would begin by putting it only in the rhetoric of taste,” said sociologist Neil Smelser, the University Professor at UC Berkeley. “I think what we’re looking at is limitless offensiveness.”

Some say the bounds of good taste have been pushed, blurred and nearly obliterated to the point where “taste” is a one-word oxymoron--that crudity and crassness seem to have become acceptable.

“Truly Tasteless” humor anthologies have sold millions of copies, as if every American regards the uncouth comeback as the perfect antidote to a strain-y day. So high is the demand for this kind of raunch that tasteless joke books now come in ethnic editions.

Then there’s the revolting T-shirt, emblazoned with appalling indelicacies, and now appearing on your local preteen-ager.

Clothing has assumed a new kind of defiance, as in, “You bet I’m wearing my underwear instead of my outerwear and what are you going to do about it?”

Antagonistically vulgar bumper stickers crowd the nation’s roadways.

And gutterspeak--once shocking and a sure sign of low-class behavior--long ago forged its way into the boardroom, the living room, the classroom.

So vast--and so commonplace--is this avalanche of everyday grossness that most of us tend to yawn instead of duck.

But buried alive in tastelessness? Well, said Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who is on the faculty at Harvard University, let’s be more precise.

“I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily taste-less,” Handlin said. “It’s bad taste. It lacks any code whatsoever.”

In a way, said Handlin, this purposefully revolting trend represents a kind of sanctioned spontaneity.

“Whatever comes into your head or your gut comes right out,” he said.

To put it mildly, Handlin added, “It’s not a form of expression that reflects deep culture.”

E. Digby Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who takes credit for inventing the term “WASP,” said the widespread erosion of what used to be known as taste reflects homogenization run amok.

“I think it’s due to the worship of equality, and leveling down instead of leveling up,” Baltzell said.

But does that mean that taste is deteriorating, even as we speak?

“I don’t think that only taste is declining,” Baltzell said. “I think life is declining.”

On the other hand, wondered Northwestern University sociology professor Bernard Beck, what’s new about that?

“At least during modern times, every moment has been a moment when people thought taste was declining,” he said.

What’s really going on, according to Beck, is “a constant evolution and even wearing away of taste, which stands for a wearing away of traditional social forms.”

Imagine the “supercilious and condescending revulsion” of the aristocrats of a century ago “against the upstart bourgeoisie” that moved in with their fat wallets and their tacky furnishings, Beck said.

“The whole thing about taste is that it’s a set of rules that’s created and maintained by a community,” Beck said. “(Taste) is a positive and honorable theory, which exists to establish and to preserve boundaries. Like every aspect of human behavior, it’s based on agreement. Of course it changes.”

Fine, fine, tell that to the millions of Americans who were less than amused when Ted Danson showed up in blackface at the Friars Club. Or the adherents to the Roman Catholic faith who think that maybe Sinead O’Connor should stop taking potshots at that nice man in the Vatican, the Pope. Or the legions of women who wish Andrew Dice Clay’s mother had taught him that misogyny is rude.

“I would interpret what’s happening as publicity run wild,” said Paul Fussell, author of “Class” and other books. “It’s a form of overstatement, and it’s just got to run its course. That’s definitely bad news for all of us.”

Ultimately, he predicted, “there will be some kind of a recoiling. The overstatement will get rather boring.”

Unfortunately, he went on, “before it does, the full depths of bad taste have to be plumbed. And there’s still a few people who haven’t taken off all their clothes.”

Speaking of clothes, said Lawrence Wortzel, a professor of marketing at Boston University, how about the in-your-face outfits that have become standard attire? How about beach thongs in the courtroom? Jogging shorts on the airplane? Cleavage in the grocery store?

“All you have to do is go to a restaurant on a weekend night,” Wortzel marveled, “and just look at the way some people are dressed.”

But whether it’s described as rank tastelessness or “an erosion of social standards,” a lot of this behavior “is about trying to assert control,” he said.

“It’s a manifestation of tremendous frustration and not being in control of things, in our own lives and in the world around us,” Wortzel said. “What you’re looking at is the crumbling of the norms that have traditionally held us together, absolutely.”

But norms come and norms go, said Anne Bernays, a novelist who describes her book “Professor Romeo” as “a novel of manners in an academic setting.”

“You keep pushing, looking for new limits,” Bernays said.

But taste, meanwhile, provides a kind of beacon.

“It gives you a feeling of safety,” she said. “It kind of places you in the world.”

Bernays has given some thought to this topic, since the novel she is currently working on, “P.M. America,” concerns a female radio talk show host who “doesn’t go all the way down to the kinky Howard Stern stuff, but she’s on the way there.”

Her ruminations on the subject of Taste in America have led Bernays to believe that decorum may not just be for dinosaurs.

Taste?

“Let’s just say that it’s kind of sick, or that it has gone to sleep,” Bernays said.

Thankfully, she added, “I think there are still a lot of people who care a lot about it.”