My lack of schadenfreude worries me

Something has been bothering me of late, and that is my total lack of schadenfreude. The malicious pleasure at someone’s misfortune never counted a lot, but it’s now totally absent, and it worries me. Take, for example, the case of John Bercow, the preening popinjay show-off whose physical stature matches the respect he earned as Speaker. I can’t think of anyone I found more irritating, unfair and unfit for high office, yet now that he has been branded a liar, a bully and someone unwelcome even at Annabel’s, I feel no particular joy. His pompous self-regard brought about his comeuppance, but I have been denied the pleasure that Gore Vidal once described as ultimate. Looking back, I can’t think of many instances of characters falling on their faces that made me happy. Even on 5 March 1953, when Joe Stalin croaked, I was too busy worrying about the boy I was to wrestle that afternoon in the 133lb class. Ditto when Andreas Papandreou hit the dust; I figured he sort of meant well for lefties, after all. In Robert Maxwell’s case, however, all bets are off. His daughter Ghislaine is paying for her father’s sins, in a way, because however immoral she may be, she was yet one more Epstein victim.

Anyway, if we’re all going to be judged by what we leave behind, I’m the last one to talk. I used to work myself into a conniption whenever Bercow was pictured with his wife, the ostentatiously uxorious con man rubbing me up the wrong way, and now I cannot feel even the tiniest hint of pleasure. We humans are a strange bunch, infinitely complex, messy, irrational creatures. We ache for things or people and once we have them – nothing. Actually, as we get old we become caricatures of ourselves, a complicated network of neuroses and complexes.