Malarky's Pond: “Schadenfreude” : Why We Want Obama to Fail

We hear this stuff all the time: The guy sitting across from you at lunch -- maybe your boss -- leans across the table, intensifying his eye contact with you, and with an air of hubris bred authority, announces something to the effect that “Rupert Murdoch owns Gingrich”, or that “George Soros owns Obama”. And you glance back appreciatively at this guy, tighten your lips a bit and nod your head in agreement. After all, he would know, wouldn’t he? He is regional manager of the vast distribution network of ladies underwear clips that employs you. A guy like him must be on a first name basis with (and, himself be owned by) the most authentic, bona fide movers and shakers of this world.

On top of that, well, he does own you. There’s little doubt of that. Just ask your secretary. She’ll tell you what a nobody you are. In fact, she probably has already told everyone else. You may have been "bread" in Kentucky, son. But you’re just a crumb up here.

The Germans, of course, have a word for it

It’s important to us that those more powerful or successful than ourselves have an Achilles heel of some sort. Oscar Wilde once told us something to the effect that "it is not enough in life that one succeed. One’s friends must fail." The Germans, of course, have a word for this: “schadenfreude” . There is no equivalent word in English. The closest are perhaps sadism or malice, but really they don’t capture the broad spirit of the word since it can encompass even small matters like the humor we take at someone’s comedic misfortune upon slipping on a banana peel. It’s basically taking your enjoyment from the misfortunes of others. In short, its being never satisfied until others are reduced to one‘s own level -- or preferably below.

So, when the lofty among us stumble or fall, it is always a delicious event in the day’s news. Network viewership statistics rise when we smell blood. It brings out the shark in us all. It provides a fresh opportunity for those of us engaged in class struggle -- the vast lower 90% of humanity -- to sharpen our teeth on the bones of the decaying carcasses of random aristocratic misfortunates.

The vast majority of us are owned

But this reminds us too. It reminds us that all of us who struggle, who trade our labor for bread, are owned by others. That we are all what that great labor leader Eugene Debs called "wage slaves". And that even here, in this land of the myth of the Great American Dream, one is no more likely to rise to the next rung of the social ladder than his father was. Most of us -- most ordinary Americans -- don’t believe any of this. But the empirical evidence supporting the case is awesome. In fact, in the past 40 years, given a resurgence of the Social Darwinism that characterized the gilded age (that which we refer to today as neo-conservatism), we are even less likely to do so.
The vast majority of us really are owned. Sometimes, at the lowest rungs of the food chain, even our costumes give it away. Those of us in the blue vests are owned by the Walton Family and their vast personal family fortune of over $80 billion dollars. Those in red polo shirts and kakis are owned by Target Corporation. Even those in the black suits, roman collars and red skull caps are owned -- by the Vatican.

So, is it so all that difficult to see that even many of the owners themselves among us are owned by others as well? That our politicians are owned by the corporations that finance their bids for election and reelection? And why their votes are not going to be tossed in favor of the interests of the vast majority of us who think that it really is “We, the people” who determine the direction and fate of America?

Why Nothing is as it Seems

At the far edges of the universe, cosmology tells us that gravity behaves differently. That Newtonian physics and even Einstein’s relativity breaks down, and that the laws of physics no longer apply as they do in our tiny neighborhood of the heavens. So it is, too, at the far edges of our national and global economies. The invisible clusters of the privileged few, the veiled aristocracy of names that seldom cross the lips of those gathered at our evening dinner tables operate in a different universe than that in which we live out our daily lives. The laws that guide our existences do not apply to them. The rules break down. They are free to manipulate both the weak and the powerful... Would that "everyman" were free to roam those other dimensions that common minds never dreamt of.

While the rest of us take our delights in “schadenfreude” -- in the misfortunes of those most like ourselves; while we scatter our rare opportunities for social progress to the ill winds of chance, to the notion of the survival of the fittest, these privileged few continue to feast on the profits of our labor and the misfortune of our ignorance.

These are not new ideas. Long ago, Mark Twain had this to say about humanity in his novel, The Mysterious Stranger :

"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing: you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touchedthem; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for,die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master toward slave, and are answered in the language of slave toward master; who are worshipped by you with your mouth, while in your heart if you have one you despise yourselves for it. The First man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not failed yet in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built."