On the other hand, don’t we enjoy the hell out of being shocked-shocked? Stuff like Skategate is as much a national pastime as baseball, sitcoms and the consumption of fast food, which are also endlessly new yet endlessly predictable. (Will the Yankees win the World Series? Or will the Yankees win the World Series next year?) Being shocked-shocked is different from being shocked. You’re shocked when a bunch of crazies fly airliners into skyscrapers. But when sports judges turn out to be corruptible, when a billionaire Texas energy tycoon and heavy political contributor turns out to be CEOing a Ponzi scheme, when a well-connected cardinal covers up for pedophile priests, when presidents lie to the American people–as we love to put it–about authorizing third-rate burglaries, about having sex with that woman, about their degree of coziness with the Kenny-boys of the world… we are shocked-shocked. We’d be glad to go on listing shock-shockeroos–fun for us, fun for you–but we’ve only got so much space and presumably you read the papers. GIULIANI GETS BOOK DEAL, HIJACKS MAYORAL ARCHIVE! SCHOOLKIDS PLAGIARIZE OFF INTERNET! OSCAR, GRAMMY VOTING ‘POLITICAL AND SUBJECTIVE’! (That last one’s made up, but you’re probably so cynical you believed it.) The point is, we get a deliciously forbidden thrill when we catch the baddie du jour secretly sliming all that we hold sacred. The other point is, after about the eighty-five-thousandth time, it’s not so deliciously forbidden anymore. It’s entertainment.

Sure, some of the stuff that shocks-shocks us is actually serious business. Fraud–or in the words of our Treasury secretary, “the genius of capitalism”–costs thousands of small fry their 401(k)s. Bribery–“unregulated soft money,” in euphemese–corrupts the democratic process. Plagiarism, whether by Kansas schoolkids or Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, offends every honest soul. Pedophiles should be in rehab or the slammer, and people who protect and enable them should be out of a job. But as the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer puts it in one of her electronic-sign installations, “Abuse of power should come as no surprise.” All the classic American narratives–“The Scarlet Letter,” “Moby-Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Forrest Gump”–tell us that we small fry are repositories of purity, innocence and integrity, while those in authority are at best hoity-toity old ladies and at worst hypocrites and madmen. And uncannily enough, the people with power and money seem to know their roles as well as the rest of us; they revivify this tired drama with the naive enthusiasm of Ruby Keeler in “42nd Street,” who goes out there a kid but has to come back a star. Could any actor improve on Andrew Fastow? John Ashcroft? Tom DeLay?

And–leaving aside stuff like practicality, morality and responsible citizenship–would we really want these people to be any different? In a 1949 Nero Wolfe mystery, Rex Stout’s narrator (and Wolfe’s legman) Archie Goodwin recounts a bit of crass behavior by one of his least favorite cops. “Naturally I was pleased,” Archie says, “since if he had acted otherwise I would have had to change my opinion of him.” When businessmen act like swine, religious leaders act like Pharisees, Republicans act like small-town Savonarolas and Democrats act like Al Gore, we get a cheesy but toothsome esthetic satisfaction that’s completely independent of our outrage, our panic, our despair, even our self-interest. When we go into shocked-shocked mode, we don’t have to bother ourselves about political, ethical and psychological complexities. Sure, thinking about complexities can induce moral snowblindness: the Hitler-was-kind-to-his-dog syndrome. But being chronically shocked-shocked is a form of self-complacency, insidiously disguising itself as prophetic indignation. And news junkies–the kind of people who write for and read this magazine, say–are particularly at risk.

In “The Guilty Vicarage,” his often-quoted essay about detective fiction, W. H. Auden speculates that murder-mystery addicts (like himself, like people who quote obscure lines from Rex Stout) suffer from “a sense of sin.” The classic mystery, Auden says, takes place in “an innocent society in a state of grace”–like the English country village–a society “in which there is no need for the law.” When the murderer is arrested, “innocence is restored and the law retires forever.” That every mystery is in essence the same, however superficially different, doesn’t put off the true addict: that’s the appeal. Those of us whose sense of civic and moral well-being depends on being regularly shocked-shocked by C-Span 2’s revelation of some conventional villain’s conventional sins needn’t feel superior to our brothers and sisters eating bonbons over paperbacks. We too savor the kick of vicarious blasphemy against the sacred and the respectable, as well as the happy ending in which the sinner–never us–has to stand naked. Whether our taste runs to emphera like Skategate or end-times shenanigans like the Bush-Cheney energy policy, it’s all good. A pretty cynical analysis, huh? So are you shocked? Didn’t think so.