Can’t anyone play the shame game anymore?

To begin, we need a word with a certain elasticity, a Hollywood kind of word ... say, “karma.”

Now a pedant would insist that “karma” is simply Sanskrit for “what goes around comes around.” An industry sort of person -- one who understands that words are just what you make of them -- would say that “karma” has precisely the plasticity needed to describe the harmonic convergence that brought together schlock publisher Michael Viner, serial fabulist Jayson Blair and aspiring governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in this week’s news.

This is no coincidence. We should remain in the moment and meditate on how close contact with Hollywood confers its own sense of malleable truth -- rather like taking one’s degree in an English department dominated by deconstructionists.

Viner, you may recall, is the one-time music and film producer who struck it tolerably rich with a line of books on tape under the Dove label, which he turned into a publishing imprint. The specialty of the house was a quickie spinoff from the sensational criminal case of the moment. There was a book by the late Nicole Brown Simpson’s onetime friend, Faye Resnick, and another by three call girls once employed by Heidi Fleiss. There was a book by a juror in the O.J. Simpson trial and a “diary” packaged out of surreptitious tape-recordings made by a middle-aged woman who visited Lyle Menendez in jail. There also were a lot of lawsuits, since Viner is -- even by Hollywood standards -- notably litigious and has relations with his associates that are remarkably contentious by any standard.

His business is not, in other words, a handshake operation.

More recently, Viner has been working under the New Millennium Entertainment label, which this week struck a deal to publish Blair’s memoir, “Burning Down My Master’s House: My Life at the New York Times.” Blair is the young reporter whose plagiarism and falsification spree rocked the Times and led to the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

Blair’s book proposal has been circulating among publishers for months, but there were no takers. Some simply felt that dealing with the author would be distasteful; others wondered about the liability implications of publishing a tell-all book by a self-admitted liar, plagiarist and drug addict. Still others may have been restrained by the stirrings -- however faint -- of an old-fashioned emotion called shame.

Not a problem for Viner, whose career is emblematic of a certain Hollywood ethos that regards other people’s scruples as a business opportunity. Tuesday he announced that next spring New Millennium would publish Blair’s book for somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, depending on certain performance criteria.

“It’s a marvelous story,” Viner told USA Today, adding that Blair “is one of the best writers in the country today ... a compelling individual and very honest, very self-critical, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to do this.”

One can only presume that budding author Blair was not discomforted when, the day after the announcement, news broke that his new publisher had sought bankruptcy protection. A federal jury in Los Angeles recently ordered New Millennium to pay $2.8 million to New York City bookstore owner Otto Penzler for breach of contract and other misconduct in connection with an anthology of mystery stories Penzler edited for Viner. Earlier, a court had blocked publication of the book’s initial version after thriller writer David Baldacci successfully argued that the volume had been packaged to look like one of his bestselling novels. When Penzler, the proprietor of the well-known Mysterious Bookshop, took Baldacci’s side in that dispute, Viner sued him for breach of contract. The $2.8-million judgment was the fruit of Penzler’s countersuit.

Perhaps Blair, who has amply demonstrated an incapacity for shame or remorse, has found a spiritual home, after all.

Which brings us to Schwarzenegger’s latest brush with this pesky truth/falsehood issue.

Earlier, journalist Mickey Kaus -- whose Kausfiles blog ornaments the online magazine Slate -- broke the story of the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s indiscreet interview with a defunct skin magazine called Oui. In it, Schwarzenegger described his drug use along with his participation in group sex and other forms of casual intimacy. After Schwarzenegger offered a variety of unsuccessful explanations, his campaign simply said that their guy had lied to the magazine as part of his promotional efforts on behalf of a documentary film.

This week, Kaus kicked loose another embarrassing interview. This one occurred in 1981, when Schwarzenegger appeared on the Johnny Carson show to promote a book and a feature film. In the course of their conversation, the actor described how, following the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, he and a friend had placed an ad in The Times offering their services as “European special bricklayers.”

Schwarzenegger, according to Kaus, said his job was to come up with an estimate and negotiate the price with the homeowner. “In the meantime,” Schwarzenegger told Carson, his bodybuilder buddy “climbed up on the roof to check the chimney.... He pushed all the chimneys over so they fell down.”

Carson: “What a racket. You go and push chimneys down and then rebuild them.”

Schwarzenegger: “Exactly.... So we had a business going very successfully for a year.”

The Sylmar quake killed 61 people, injured more than 2,500 and caused $550 million in damage. Though no precise figures are available, insurance industry analysts believe fraudulent home repair scams subsequently cost consumers tens of millions. Most of the victims, they believe, were elderly, distraught or otherwise vulnerable.

Not to worry, though, Schwarzenegger campaign spokesman Rob Stutzman told Kaus that the candidate was lying -- again. There’s “no evidence [there’s] any truth to it.... I’d chalk it up to shtick.”

In an interview, Kaus said, “It fits in with Arnold’s line that the Oui interview also was a lie to promote a film. In both cases, Schwarzenegger is treating his audience as a bunch of marks who he can con. One senses that maybe he approaches politics this way, as well.... The other, more revealing, thing is that he thought this sort of story about conning people was appealing.”

It’s a distinctly Hollywood contribution to contemporary politics. No more bothersome second thoughts or tiresome contrition. Confronted with the failings or indiscretions of the past, simply deny it ever happened; just say you lied and then get on with it.

That’s publishing and politics, Hollywood style. All that’s required is that you lose the capacity to blush.