posted 2007/06/28 at 15:19
I can't quite determine when, exactly, the German word schadenfreude -- the guilty pleasure and joy one sometimes feels at seeing another's misfortune -- became such an integral part of our modern-day lexicon. My first exposure to the word came when my sister bought a cassette tape of Dennis Miller reading one of his collections of rants he first presented on his HBO show and then later made into books. (We didn't get HBO until the mid-late 90s when we got DirecTV, so we didn't actually see his show until then.) For some reason my sister kept that cassette out in the kitchen, so whenever I was out there putting together a meal of some sort, I'd pop the tape in the kitchen stereo and listen to bits of it. I'm pretty sure I must have listened to the tape at least ten times all the way through, and Miller's rant on schadenfreude stuck with me simply because the concept of schadenfreude was so intriguing to me. At the very least it tickled me, back in my pre-English student days, that a foreign language would have a word to describe a concept that is nearly impossible to describe in one or two words in English.
In the years that have followed, though, my relationship with schadenfreude has become more and more uneasy. On one level, schadenfreude is, by its very nature, something that makes you feel a little bit guilty when you experience it, because you know that you're not supposed to take joy in the misfortune of others. It seems, on the surface, something that you should be making a conscious effort to avoid. However, I don't think it is actually possible for most people, let alone myself, to totally eliminate schadenfreude from their lives. As bad as it may be, at the very least schadenfreude is something which is usually internal, and as long as that joy is not externalized in a crass comment or a Nelson-esque "HA HA," it is something which ultimately is not damaging to the people around us, and the fact that we experience a bit of guilt through schadenfreude allows us to acknowledge that it is wrong, even if there is that small part of ourself that kind of gets off on it. Schadenfreude may not be the best thing in the world, but there are certainly much, much worse feelings to internalize and externalize, and all things being equal I'm guessing that allowing yourself to experience schadenfreude every once in a while may actually be kind of healthy, as a way to allow some negative feelings to manifest themselves in a relatively harmless way.
This all having been said, I'm kind of surprised that I didn't experience some small bit of schadenfreude at the recent incarceration of Paris Hilton. As I've said before, I cannot find any rational explanation as to why Paris receives any real kind of publicity, let alone serious news coverage, and I think that she is as good of an example as I could possibly hope to produce as to how our culture leads us to care more about the minutia of some random person's life than about more pressing local, national, and international concerns. The fact that one survey I heard about on the news said that 95% of the respondents believed that Paris should be jailed for her probation violation just reinforces, to me, the notion that Paris' celebrity status and newsworthiness is largely a concoction of the American news-entertainment media to either distract us from the real issues facing our lives, or to create something for itself to cover and follow, thus creating a self-perpetuating industry. It's not that I feel any hatred towards Paris herself, but at the same time I wish I didn't have to hear about the relatively insignificant details of her life when I think there are far more important things that our news and our culture as a whole needs to discuss.
When Paris first reported to jail I didn't particularly care about it in any way, except that I was annoyed at all the news coverage about it. After she was released early by the sheriff and then the judge turned around and ordered her back to jail, though, I found myself feeling a fair deal of sympathy towards her. Pretty much everything I heard about it on the news suggested that the judge in question was treating Paris in an entirely unreasonable way given the nature of the case, and was acting either out of hatred towards Paris and/or celebrity culture, or else using Paris' case as a way to leverage the small bit of celebrity he gained from it. In the weeks that followed, pretty much every news report I saw on the story kept showing the same grainy photo of Paris' tear-streaked face in the police car as she was being whisked back to jail, and I heard far more details about how she was nearly dragged out of the courtroom beforehand than anyone really needed to know. Given my feelings towards celebrity culture, I would have thought that I might have cracked even the slightest smile inwardly towards Paris' misfortune, but instead all I could do was shake my head and somehow actually feel kind of bad for her and the way everyone else seemed to be taking such delight from her imprisonment.
It could perhaps just be that I was feeling more upset that the twists involved in her imprisonment were putting her in the news so much. The coverage of her release particularly bothered me, as I, along with most of my long-time readers I suspect, was absolutely devastated at the time by the news of the Benoit tragedy in Atlanta, and wished the news networks would have devoted more time to that. (I haven't followed professional wrestling to any appreciable extent in ages now, and hadn't even watched any wrestling television this year until this past Monday, but Jeff still passes along news of the deaths of the wrestlers I used to watch, and each death still saddens me. Would that I could write about the tragedy without likely attracting the maelstroms of criticism that drove me from writing about wrestling nearly seven years ago now.) Still, now that Paris is out of jail and back to doing whatever it is she does that allegedly makes her life so newsworthy, can we all please just move on and leave her alone, both for her sake and ours as well?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon