Some years ago, Jack Black was cast in a comedy called “Shallow Hal”. The idea behind the movie was that Tim Robbins met him in an elevator and hypnotized him so that he would see someone’s inner beauty on the outside. He famously met Gwyneth Paltrow and saw who we normally see. In the movie, she was playing someone that was morbidly obese. One of the more interesting scenes had him viewing a woman that looked hideous to him, but to everyone else looked beautiful. They really didn’t explore that portion of the story that much. It seems that his altered perceptions went both ways.

The movie was a low budget comedy and wasn’t really meant to be a huge philosophical treatise on the world around us. It would seem that Kimberly Guilfoyle is beginning to look like that other woman in the film. There seems to come a time when what is on the inside and outside match. It is a fascinating thing for someone my age. She isn’t much older than me and I expect to see a number of women like her at my 30th high school reunion this summer.

If there’s ever a need for a warning about the long term effects of heavy drinking and drug use on a person’s face, this is it. pic.twitter.com/4Ll6Qq4noW

— Sgt Joker (@TheSGTJoker) June 2, 2023

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy this as much as it looks like I enjoy it. Schadenfreude is shameful as we noted in an earlier piece. There is the very real consideration that enjoying something like this too much makes you an ugly person on the inside. The whole point of the exercise is that the ugly on the inside eventually makes it to the outside. I typically enjoy these types of events because you get to catch up with people you liked in school but also get to take a look at the road not travelled. In my case, there were obvious road blocks on those roads so that a part of me enjoys seeing that life turned out better because I wasn’t allowed to travel down that road.

Guilfoyle has lived an interesting life. She was once married to Gavin Newsome, then became a very popular and appealing face on Fox News, and finally wound up with Donald Trump Jr. Obviously, that arc could be seen as pointed up or pointed down based on your perception of those events. I imagine most people here see that as a pointedly dissenting arc from the top shelf to something someone might kick into the dustpan of history.

So, I leave this with only a few jokes and comments. Someone wise once said a picture paints a 1000 words and far be it from to me add a ton of words to that picture. As people around here know far too well, I could write 1000 words about just about anything. So, I stop and leave this for everyone to enjoy.

There are occasionally moments that make you smile. They are hard to explain. We shouldn’t smile in these moments and we often feel guilty about not feeling guilty about someone else having a hard time. The Germans came up with a name for it. They called it schadenfreude. The closest English translation I have heard when describing this uniquely German word is “shameful joy.” It seems the notorious MTG was wielding the gavel for some stupid reason and she was trying to bring the House to order. As you might suspect, it went about as well as any of us could imagine.

I’m usually not one to laugh at other people’s misery. It’s like watching someone stumble down the stairs. You want to make sure they are okay first. After all, none of us really aims to be that big of an asshole at the end of the day. We aren’t rooting for bodily injury here. However, if someone just has a bruised ego we find ourselves unable to suppress at least just a tiny chuckle at their expense. The beauty of schadenfreude is that others feel it about us in equal proportion. Paul McCartney once said, “the love you take is equal to the love you make.” In this case, the bad vibes you take are equal to the bad vibes you create.

MTG is the kid in the back of class that heckles the teacher every day and makes his or her life a living hell. Then, suddenly when the teacher is gone the assistant principal gives her a dose of her own medicine and puts her in charge for a day. Suddenly, she gets to feel the way that just about every other adult in that room feels when they have to deal with her performance art. Normally, I wouldn’t condone this kind of behavior from anyone. Normally, I would say you need to rise above it all and show the world you are the adult party. That would ignore the fact that these are not normal times.

I couldn’t tell you how all of this ends. A part of me wonders whether this is just the natural course of things. I have to wonder if my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents felt the same way about their elected leaders. Did they see a few statemen mixed in with a whole group of performance artists that couldn’t care less about doing actual good? Was it always like this? Were we always somehow represented by the worst among us? Deep down, I know this isn’t true, but I keep holding out hope that we can somehow bypass these idiots to keep this thing going. In the meantime, enjoy a good laugh.