At first, we were shocked about Charlie Sheen: He said what? Again? By the second week of his all-Charlie-all-the-time-crazy-talk tour of our screens, we were no longer shocked — we were bored.  Charlie Sheen: His public rantings were inescapable a few weeks ago.  Charlie Sheen: His public rantings were inescapable a few weeks ago.  Yeah, yeah, you're a tiger, you're a warlock, you're a rock star. Winning! Moving on now. What's next?  Have you noticed that the arc of our astonishment at the behavior of celebrities is collapsing? We're just not shocked, not anymore, or at least not for long. Once, Americans could be relied on to choke on their Cheerios at news in the morning papers or on the Today show that, say, some oleaginous politician, especially a family-values politician, was caught cheating on his wife.  Nowadays we're all ho-hum. But an oleaginous politician cheating on his dying wife? Now that gets the gasps. We're shocked — until we're not and something else egregious wanders into view.  Sheen isn't the only celebrity ranting at us these days. Seems like only yesterday we were listening to recordings of Mel Gibson's rants. And Alec Baldwin's rants. And Christian Bale's rants. Fashion designer John Galliano's rants turned up at the same time as Sheen's and briefly vied for attention (until Galliano scuttled into rehab and silence and Sheen kept on ranting).  So why aren't we more alarmed at our failure to be alarmed? What's happened to our national ability to be stupefied by transgressive behavior? And does it matter?  Not much, according to transgressive novelist Bret Easton Ellis, writing in Newsweek two weeks ago in an against-the-tide defense of Sheen's behavior titled "Charlie Sheen Is Winning." Sheen is giving America exactly what it wants from a modern celeb, Ellis argues.  "Do we really want manners? Civility? (Entertainment empire) courtesy? Hell, no, we want reality, no matter how crazy. ... Sheen doesn't care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea of PR."  Well, maybe. But some mental health experts are more than a little worried.  Alan Hilfer, chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, pivots immediately to the movies.  "Remember Psycho? It was more than enough to shock us — it made people jump out of their seats," Hilfer says. "But now it's considered passé. We get inured to almost everything; exposure creates familiarity. We're being flooded by media, and (consequently) we've become matter-of-fact about things we shouldn't be matter-of-fact about."  The bar for being shocked has been set ever higher, agrees Jeffrey Parsons, professor of psychology at Hunter College in Manhattan, thanks to 24/7 media —YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of the information sources pouring a torrent of tripe into our consciousness.  "We're bombarded with so much stimuli we're numb and desensitized — unless it's really big," Parsons says. "It's like the addiction model: Over time, we become so used to it that it takes more and more to achieve the same level of (engagement). Seems like we need bigger and better and more salacious tidbits to pique our interest."  The consequence, he says, is that bad behavior is encouraged. Take the case of the boy in the balloon in 2009, when a Colorado couple sent up a helium-filled balloon and lied about their 6-year-old son being inside. We were horrified that a child could be lost in a balloon, and when it turned out to be a publicity stunt, we were stunned at the distorted thinking of his parents.  "People lose track of rational thought in the thick of attention," Parsons says. "They're just thinking, 'This might get me on TV!' And that becomes the excuse for bad or inappropriate behavior."  One creepy aspect of all this is the growing sense that a celebrity disintegrating in public is now seen as popular entertainment, says novelist and image consultant Eric Dezenhall, who helps pols and celebs deal with public-relations crises.  "The only sin in contemporary America is failing to entertain us," Dezenhall says with a sigh.  Take the recent case of New York Congressman Christopher Lee, who got caught sending pictures of himself shirtless to a stranger he met online. The pictures were hardly naughty, let alone illegal (although deeply silly), but Lee was so embarrassed he immediately resigned. By contrast, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who ran off to Argentina to visit his mistress and lied about his whereabouts, managed to survive the scandal (and his weepy news conference) and serve out his term.  "Our obsession with (these scandals) is not moral. It's not about disapproval, it's about the sheer entertainment value of seeing somebody blow themselves up," Dezenhall says.  But sometimes it's not just about the hilarious look-at-that value of public misbehavior. Sometimes, we're shocked the wrongdoer assumed he could get away with it. Exhibit A: Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. Despite constant media attention, he kept a mistress, fathered her baby, lied about them repeatedly and got others to lie for him — all while running for president and while his wife was dying of cancer.  We haven't been shocked about adulterous politicians for decades — not after learning the sordid details of President Clinton's do-si-do with an intern, and not after learning about President Kennedy's extracurricular activities in the White House, to name just two examples.  So why were we so stunned by Edwards' behavior? One reason: Millions who had been prepared to vote for him realized they had dodged disaster. "His ultimate sin was he said to the public, 'You would buy anything I say,' " Dezenhall says. "And that is what Americans really hate, when someone thinks we're stupid."  Moreover, there's some evidence that cheating on your cancer-ridden wife might not be beyond the pale anymore. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich had a messy personal life: He cheated on his first wife with his second and cheated on his second wife with his third. Although he denies it, his first wife claims he visited her after cancer surgery to discuss their divorce. Now he's back and thinking of running for president, having sought, he said, "God's forgiveness" for his past sins.  In the sports world, our capacity to be shocked ("Say it ain't so, Joe!") by athletic misconduct has steadily diminished with each new scandal. Remember baseball slugger Mark McGwire and the historic 1998 season when he broke the home-run record? Remember the national euphoria over his achievement and how we wanted to hear nothing that spoiled the feel-good wave that swept us away?  Seven years later, McGwire was hauled before Congress, where he tearfully denied using steroids, and five years after that, he admitted that he did indeed use steroids and he was sorry. Did his admission change anything? Not really. By that point, we were over it — the excitement and the disappointment — and we moved on.  In Hollywood, where cheating is nothing new, misbehavior is often either tolerated or admired, and where everything is about entertainment, some cases of celebs-behaving-badly are just that — compelling spectacle. We regard the delinquency of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan with at least as much diversion as dismay.  But even in Hollywood, there are things that shock — and then they don't. "Remember when Woody Allen got together with his stepdaughter? Even the cultural left said, 'Enough,' " Dezenhall says. But now, 19 years later, does anyone really care about Allen and Soon-Yi Previn? The two are long married, the adoptive parents of two, and their tumultuous past has had little effect on his stature as a movie director (even if they're not welcome at family dinners).  It's a "stupid myth" that Americans are puritanical, Dezenhall says. "We're not. We may have been once but not anymore."  It's not clear that, except for the actual Puritans, we ever were, judging from the tales of scandals past in The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal by George Childs Kohn and A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing by Michael Farquhar.  Maybe one reason why it takes more to shock us these days is that buried deep in the collective subconscious, there's knowledge that, well, we have seen and heard it all before.  "Everything we get so upset about now has got a precedent that was 10 times more shocking," says Farquhar, whose most recent book, Behind the Palace Doors, is a compendium of the endlessly scandalous behavior of royals. "Society evolves, but the sins stay the same."  People in power think they can get away with more because, humans being human, arrogance and self-absorption will never be in short supply. It's always been this way, it always will be, Farquhar says, so it's no wonder the rest of us just shrug.  "One thing that seemed to always go on then and now is that people who break the law or are unethical or improper in some way seem to think they can cover it up, and then the cover-up becomes as great as the scandal," Kohn says. "And the press always uncovers it."  However, Kohn points out that in some ways, our capacity to be shocked has improved over time when it comes to murder and mayhem, death and disaster.  For instance, in the 19th century, lynchings were common and unremarkable, so much so that people organized parties around them and had themselves photographed, grinning cheerfully, with the tortured body. Today, such a scene is unthinkable, breaking-news horrifying to all.  Time was, a presidential candidate involved in a duel would be considered no big deal; today, not so much.  "Certain things are not tolerated any longer," Farquhar says. "Sex is still tolerated, dueling is not."  , visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor  . For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to  . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to  We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button.
In our hyper-media age, shocking behavior by the rich and famous just ain't what it used to be.