Friday 19th September, 2003 – A Pompous Man Writes About Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is a great thing. For those of us who will never actually achieve enough in life to satisfy our grumbling, Grammar School-bloated egos, revelling in the failure and embarrassment of others is a necessary evil. Obviously, the person whose failure and embarrassment you are revelling in has to be unpleasant in some way – there is nothing nice or necessary about enjoying the humiliation of your girlfriend or your mum, for instance. That’s just mean. The humiliatee has to be in some way disagreeable. The ideal scenario is when the humiliatee is your arch-enemy, and you are the one on hand to administer the (metaphorical) killer blow.

Being a petty, immature man, overly sensitive to criticism, I have a long list of arch-enemies, past and present. People whom I can spend hours ranting about: at times waxing lyrical, at others burbling incoherently as the bile rises high in my gut and begins to affect my brain.

There has been the ex-housemates, both called Steve - One mute and morbidly obese, with an aversion to actually shitting in the toilet; the other tall, spindly, and bird-like, with appalling personal hygiene and a way with blithe, jaw-droppingly offensive racist bon-mots.

Or the other ex-housemate, Abu – a drug-dealer from central Africa, who partied with his friends into the night, every night, in the room next to mine, smoking powerful marijuana and shouting at each other in their mother tongue; a language apparently made solely of aggressive, ululating vowel-sounds. I. Cried. With. Frustration. And. Impotent. Rage.

Or a former colleague whose name I’ll withhold, whose smarmy, pinched face seemed to challenge me every day to find another reason not to punch it; whose every Blair-esque estuary consonant (making ‘mate’ into ‘made’ and ‘better’ into ‘bedder’) resounded deafeningly in my skull; whose appalling novelty ties haunted my dreams. NOVELTY TIES.

In this company, my current arch-enemy is small fry. But, nonetheless, she serves an important function in my world, and has more than enough objectionable personal qualities to fulfil her role.

The lady in question is in the autumn of her life, but behaves like a cross between a hyperactive 10 year-old girl and a gauche, flag-waving, 18 year-old student. She screams and laughs inappropriately and dominates all conversation with heavy-handed expositions of her ‘Principles’. She has a number of Principles, we have been informed on a number of occasions, each of them fine in their own way; laudable even, if utterly predictable. But each of them rendered face-smashingly irritating when re-iterated smugly for the 400th time, with the same patronising intonation and astonishingly silly ‘right on!’ fist gesture.

She is also a self-proclaimed ‘intellectual snob’. This is my number-one bug-bear, and condemned the lady in question to arch-enemy status the moment the words left her mouth. I won’t go on, but how can anyone be proud to be an intellectual snob? Isn’t it just another way of saying that you are a simple, straightforward snob? Its no coincidence that the things that ‘intellectual snobs’ tend to feel are beneath them – soap operas, tabloid newspapers, fast food, celebrity gossip – are overwhelmingly associated with being working class. How does haughtily declaring a massive swathe of culture and knowledge beneath you make you a better person? Who decides what is good knowledge and what is bad knowledge? Surely it’s all good? I can understand that it is not necessarily a good thing if your head is so full of celebrity gossip and football trivia that it leaves no room for other things, but that doesn’t make the celebrity gossip and football trivia bad in itself. It’s the knowledge that is missing that is bad, not the knowledge that is there. I can name all of Girls Aloud. And New Kids On The Block. And Busted. People will mock me for this. I can also name all of The Smiths and all of Radiohead, and all the current Booker Prize shortlist. People will respect this. Why? BAH!

Either way, my current arch-enemy is both annoying in her own right, and annoying for being the personification of everything that is wet and sanctimonious about the ‘liberal’. The term ‘liberal’ has become one of abuse in America as of late, ultimately meaning anyone who questions the government in any way, and it has lost its true meaning. Being liberal used to mean being tolerant and progressive; now it is synonym for being mealy-mouthed and cowardly. This is not fair.

Except in the case of my arch-enemy. She is what the hawk sees in his minds eye when he spits out the word ‘liberal’ to describe anyone slightly to the left of the hard, wealthy right. No politically correct* truism is too obvious for her to repeat, no knit-your-own-yoga-mat cliché too broad for her to conform to. And when she condescendingly talks me through her reasons for boycotting Nestle for the 20th time, as she undoubtedly will do in the course of the next week, I will wish for nothing more than to be able to produce an enormous pint glass full of frothy, glowing, pink, strawberry Nesquick and drink it in front of her stupid, pious face.

Strangely, I blame America for forcing me into this hateful, bilious corner. Post September 11th, popular political discourse has largely split down the middle. The whole ‘War on Terrorism’ is such an incendiary, divisive issue that it has politicised people who never really cared before. And we have been encouraged by George Bush and friends’ “you’re with or against us” rhetoric into taking (relatively) extreme positions. So, many people either seem to be firmly in the “all brown men are terrorists, how would you like it if you’d been on that plane, we must strike and strike now” camp, or in the “America single-handedly caused the entire mess in the Middle East and in Africa, and in Central America during their short history, and ha ha ha isn’t ‘Dubya’ stupid” camp, with no room for any middle ground. As a result, you can’t move for people spouting bland political truisms, plucked from that day’s Daily Mail / Guardian.

I can’t help arguing with people who take up these silly, off-the-rack positions. Which is fine when the person is a pro-war hawk-style person, as it allows me to buff my ego, and is far closer to where I actually stand politically. But when the person is a boss-eyed, sanctimonious Michael Moore-ophile, it feels good to argue at the time, but bad afterwards, as I wonder exactly how right-wing I must look – even if this is in the eyes of a buffoon, it is still a bad feeling.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was Schadenfreude, and its joys. I was delighted to be on-hand for a delightful moment the other day, as myself, arch-enemy, and another colleague were discussing work and so on. We were talking about holidays, and bringing back nice food and drink etc. I mentioned that my dad had recently returned from Guyana with a lovely bottle of rum for me.

Obviously, I was asked why he went to Guyana, and I said that that is where he is from. The news that my dad was Black seemed to hit arch-enemy like a thunderbolt, as if she were suddenly aware that she had to ‘watch what she said’. In her flusterment, she said:

“Oooh, he’s from the Caribbean? Do you think he might want two green parrots?”

And then she looked mortified. And I didn’t mind twisting the knife by prissily informing her that just because my dad is from the Caribbean does not mean he has some natural affinity with parrots, or indeed with any animal.

Obviously she didn’t mean anything by it. Obviously the fact that the Caribbean was mentioned just triggered the fact that she knows someone who is trying to find homes for parrots, as she has been saying all week. Obviously.

But after the weeks of preaching, the weeks of finger-wagging, the weeks of patronising, is was lovely to just sit there and watch her twist in the wind.

As I said, I am a petty and immature man. And judged simply by the content of this weblog, a misanthropic, pompous, right wing man too. I’m really not though. Just petty and immature. Really.

*a horrible term, another that has had its true meaning hijacked by the right to describe anything that makes them aware of their own prejudices, but necessary here.