Those of us who had dared to dream that, at last, Germaine Greer (intellectually stimulating, female, divorced, dangerous, agnostic, accomplished, and, importantly, a Shakespeare scholar) would become our next governor-general have had those dreams smashed to smithereens.

The prime minister has announced that the next GG is to be yet another safe, white, soldierly male. NSW Governor and former senior army officer David Hurley is a veteran not only in the military sense but in the marital sense too.

He has been married to Mrs Hurley for 40 years and the prime minister, in announcing David Hurley’s appointment and singing his praises, specifically mentioned the durability of the Hurley’s marriage as a wondrous thing that sets the nation a moral, character-building example.

Photographs of the irritatingly perfect-looking Hurley family have decorated news reports of the Hurley appointment. Looking at them (the glossy photographs) moves me to think how wrong Leo Tolstoy was when he famously wrote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Think again, Leo. Isn’t it more the case (think not only of the Hurleys' pic but of the just-released official 2018 Christmas card of the smug Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the three fruits of their union) every happy-looking, every perfect-seeming family is for the rest of us uniquely irritating, in its own way?

Perhaps, agonising over his short list of choices, the prime minister decided that Dr Greer’s 1978 divorce (and her having no beaming, morality-inspiring ideal family to pose with for heart-warming official photographs) made her marginally less suitable than David Hurley. Then, as well, Dr Greer being an atheist while the Hurleys are (like our pentecostalist prime minister) busily Christian, may have counted for a smidgin of something.

Then, too, although Hurley can be relied upon to be safe, Dr Greer would have been thrillingly, suspensefully dangerous. That is what some of us, thrill-seeking patriots delighting in seeing one of Australia’s very best minds in frequent action, would have loved about her gubernatorial tenure.

Dr Greer (she is 80 in January, bless her, and this was surely her last chance of being GG) would have kept us always on the edges of our seats. What’s more the many Shakespeare references in her speeches and comments would have lifted and nourished the tone of Australia’s public conversation, presently so shrivelled and banal.

Mrs Hurley is famous for organising inclusive “singalongs” at Government House in Sydney and one imagines these will, now, become a feature at Yarralumla during David Hurley’s tenure. One doubts that Dr Greer as GG would have held singalongs.

No doubt my irreverent remarks, here, about the Hurleys, will mean that they will freeze me out, and shun me and never invite me to a singalong. This will hurt (and one imagines the Hurleys' singalongs are mostly of Christian hymns that I know and love from my years of naïve belief).

But then all principled journalists know from experience that there is a price to be paid for one’s unflinching frankness and fearlessness.

How I love the smell of schadenfreude (delight in the misfortune of awful people) in the mornings!

In a recent, never-to-be-forgotten column I agonised a little over, what a guilty pleasure it is (for those of us who would sooner be eaten alive by werewolves than vote Liberal or National) to watch the Morrison coalition destroying itself.

Now, this very week, there’s more gorgeous schadenfreude in the “sugar baby” scandal engulfing Nationals MP Andrew Broad, his party and his government.

But wait, revelling schadenfreudemongers! Hold your horses!

Just in the few days since my aforementioned column about schadenfreude’s pleasures, newsworthy, much-reported detail has appeared in the media about research done at Emory University in the USA.

You can read these reports in full yourself but in essence the newsworthy finding made by the psychologists is that our delight in schadenfreude may dehumanise us, may say something dark, even something psychopathic about us.

To quote the Research Digest news story of the Emory findings: “One possibility is that when people experience Schadenfreude, they undergo a [temporary] process similar to that experienced by individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits: motivated by certain situational and to a lesser extent dispositional variables, the perceiver tends to dehumanise the victim, temporarily losing the motivation to detect the victim’s mind, much like a psychopath,” the psycologists write.

“In fact ... the process of dehumanisation ‘may lie at the core of this emotion’.”

Yes, examining my feelings (for I agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living) I notice how my first, schadenfreudery reactions to Andrew Broad’s alleged indiscretions were unfeelingly inhumane. They required/enabled me to dehumanise Broad when, more humanely, I might have had the sober thought that all members of my flawed sex know what it is to be to some greater or lesser extent testosterone-deranged.

As it was, perhaps temporarily psychopathic, it suited me to think of the disgraced Broad as a National and coalition puppet-dummy first and as a living, feeling, human male (with a similarly human, vulnerable family) a very distant second.

What has become of me, so politicised, so unkind? Yes the examined life is essential, but it can keep us awake, agonising, at night.