St. Louis ? After the melee in Michigan, the generalizations have come flying as rapidly as punches thrown by Ron Artest.

Over the last week, we’ve been told that sportsmanship is all but dead in America.

And that white fans resent African-American athletes.

And that fans are angry because they envy the wealth and fame enjoyed by professional sports stars.

And that fans are alienated because they can’t relate to the NBA’s hip-hop culture.

There’s an element of truth to all of those generalizations. But is this really supposed to be a revelation, that our society is poisoned by hatred, jealousy and intolerance?

Frankly, I’m shocked that so many people were shocked by the basketbrawl near the end of the Indiana-Detroit game.

This random violence has been erupting in sports for as long as fans and athletes have been sharing space in arenas and stadiums in North America.

I’ll go back as far as 1912, when baseball legend Ty Cobb was suspended after going into the stands to viciously assault a disabled fan.

In 1955, fans set off a tear-gas bomb and rioted on the streets of Montreal after NHL President Clarence Campbell suspended Canadiens player Maurice Richard for striking another player with a hockey stick. The episode began when fans inside the Montreal Forum pelted Campbell with food, garbage and other objects as he sat in the stands. At least 60 arrests were made.

So why are we pretending that athletes vs. fans is something new and abnormal? It’s just as commentator Keith Olbermann said on his MSNBC show Wednesday, when he introduced the latest report on the NBA’s unscheduled Wrestlemania: “It’s the latest in the series of our sports civilization as we know it. … We have the worst sports incident, ever, every year or so.”

The most dramatic reason for our perception of the way things are is the advent of 24-hour news via cable television and the Internet. The video of Artest and two Pacers teammates duking it out with Pistons fans has been rolling in a seemingly endless loop since it happened. If you’ve been watching TV, you can’t avoid seeing it.

In the olden days — when athletes and fans played just as rough as they do now — the TV cameras weren’t there to record the dementia. But in a 24-hour news cycle, Artest has received the Zapruder-film treatment.

“It’s grist for every cable news station, for network news, for talk-show demagoguery,” said Martin Kaplan of USC’s Annenberg School For Communication, during an interview on MSNBC. “That stuff gets played over and over again. It becomes fodder for entertainment. People are getting big (ratings) by replaying it. Shame on us.”

That’s right.

We zero in on the hostilities that occur inside sports venues and view them as isolated and exclusive actions, instead of realizing that these outbreaks are representative of a larger, deeper, overall problem.

Here’s your root cause: Anger.

Surliness is on display everywhere we look.

The road rage on our highways.

The relentless smear campaigns, attack ads, and politics of personal destruction in our elections.

The shouting and the spewing on talk radio.

If there’s ever been a time when our nation was able to discuss race, religion, politics and sports in a civil and enlightened manner without resorting to mean-spirited finger-pointing and pettiness, then I missed it.