PARIS

SCHADENFREUDE! What a word! How did English ever manage without it? Schadenfreude!

It means the delight we take in another’s misfortune.

So un-Christian a concept, so un-Christian a pleasure. Newspaper columns should be positive and constructive things. Generally.

But today, let us sin. Let us sin voluptuously, without moderation or prophylactic encumbrance. Let us relish the spectacle of human folly and greed righteously punished and gloat and gloat and gloat.

What do we feel — we being the carless who must depend on lousy bus service, or we being the drivers of modest cars, which for a decade have been bullied on the roads by SUVs, pickups and Hummers — when we read about owners of such monsters and how they pay a fortune to fill their tanks?

Schadenfreude. These whiners don’t even suspect yet what “paying a fortune” might mean. A $100 a tank? What squeals they’ll be emitting when they hit $200.

All of you who fought for so long to overturn the double-nickel speed limit? Pay, pay, pay!

Ooh, what beautiful agony!

What do we feel — we being the non-homeowners, perhaps because we judged the prices ridiculously high, or we the homeowners who bought what we could afford and paid for it — when we read about balloon mortgages going unpaid and mini-mansions being auctioned off?

Yes! Yes! Schadenfreude! Their piteous cries tickle our ears and make us smile.

And let us not forget the banks, which if we’re lucky are just beginning their long stint in purgatory. Billion-dollar writedowns, you say? Bring it on, we say. We all know about those credit-card pushers — every kid who enters college is deluged with offers. They wanted to play in the big leagues? Then take your losses like men. Billions and billions gone? Those office windows on Wall Street don’t open anymore, but there are still bridges just a short walk away.

And how about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They were created to encourage the housing industry, as if people would be sleeping in tents and caves without the Feds to tuck them in at night. Their capital levels, I read, are far lower than those of the banks, which are scandalously low to begin with. (Just how little actual money the banks have, compared with what they owe, is something nobody ever wants to discuss openly. Mustn’t frighten the little people.)

William Poole, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, said in July that “Congress ought to recognize that these firms are insolvent” and intervene.

No. Let’s watch them squirm and squeal. Schadenfreude.

All you who ridiculed the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter in his cardigan and his turn-down-the-thermostat sermon, will your heating bills soon to start to hurt? It will hurt? Oooh, that hits me right in the G-spot, for Gotcha — serves you right!

And all you with those fat air conditioners that you thought would take all the sweat out of summer — how many cool hundreds will you spend this year? Eh? Be still my heart.

As things start to crumble, let us hope that those perfidious leaders of ours, in the State House and in Washington, who encouraged Americans to spend and gamble their way to prosperity, start up a chorus of agonizing moans as well. They’re the ones who let the banks live on daredevil-low credit ratios. They’re the ones who kept saying they trusted the wisdom of the American people — a line that is the mark of the political huckster.

You know they’re all scrambling right now to devise the means to make the prudent pay for the mischief of the reckless and the corrupt. “They will not fail, we will not allow them to fail,” John McCain said of the desperate mortgage duo. He knows where his votes are buttered. And don’t hold your breath for Barack Obama to say, after Herbert Spencer, that “the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

Not a chance.

So we must gather our freude-buds while we may.

The greed, the stupidity, the obfuscating mendacity are all having their predictable consequences. The wizards are sweating buckets behind their curtains now. But sometime soon this fun will come to an end, the government will intervene and you know what that means: They’ll tax whoever they can to bail out whomever they really need to keep their ball rolling.

We, too, will be suffering then. But we shall have had our moments. Like the Bear Stearns collapse.

Friends, wasn’t that a joy to behold?

Laurence G. Proulx, an occasional contributor, is an editor at the International Herald Tribune.