One of the mysteries in this country has to do with the sudden plunge in the crime rates in the 1990s. Some attribute it to Mayor Giuliani, because New York had such a high crime rate and after Mr. Giuliani took over at City Hall it started plunging, though some of the policies had been begun under Mayor Dinkins and the plunge continued under Mr. Bloomberg. But the mystery stemmed from the fact that crime rates seemed to plunge all over, even in places that weren’t using Commissioner Bratton’s compstat system, though the New York reductions went beyond the national decline. We are not sociologists and haven’t done any kind of double-blind study on the matter. But it has occurred to us that at some point along in there, America just got tired of all the crime. Worn out. If one thinks of it all as some kind of crime wave, part of the explanation is that it just burned out.

We’ve begun to wonder whether — between the Don Imus affair and the Duke rape case — we are in that kind of moment in respect of the coarsening of American culture. There was a time, after all, when to have someone saying on our airwaves the kinds of things Mr. Imus said was just unthinkable. Forget whether the Federal Communications Commission would allow it. It was just unthinkable because it was racist and sexist and public and coarse. And it was also unthinkable that a group of male college athletes at a distinguished university could hire a young mother to come to a party where there was heavy drinking going on and pay her to take her clothes off and remain enrolled in good standing, even if there were no false charges of rape.

There was, and not so long ago, a time when it was hard to imagine that the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose very specialty was incitement and anti-Jewish activism, could somehow emerge as a voice for civility. And what ironical turns it all takes. First Rev. Sharpton lights into Mr. Imus and gets him driven from the airwaves. Then Mr. Imus goes on the air, according to what the ever vigilant Drudge Report called a “rough transcript,” to ask when Rev. Sharpton would be apologizing to the three whom Rev. Sharpton and others were so harsh about when they were wrongly accused in the Duke case. And then Mr. Imus went back to calling his own remarks of the other day stupid.

It’s almost, in other words, a moment of national relief. Rev. Sharpton has come out against over-the-top, racist language and Mr. Imus is calling for Rev. Sharpton to apologize (when he’s not apologizing himself ). It makes us wonder whether, through all the acrid smoke, there is the glimmer of an earlier, calmer time, when the airwaves were given over to more sedate talk, families could calmly gather around the dial, undergraduates had to obey certain rules of decorum or sensible behavior, lest they get expelled, and there wasn’t all this need for apologizing. Again, we haven’t done a double-blind study, but it’s the kind of thing this remarkable week has left us wondering.