Jackie sez: there are some people who positively relish watching other people spat.
Back in the Sixties, there was a popular book written by Dr Eric Berne called Games People Play. Berne was a proponent and popularizer of something called Transactional Analysis which many of us, who were alive in the Sixties, survived somehow.
In the introduction to the book, Berne postulated the following conversation:
First person: Ok, let's play a game.
Second person: But I don't want to play games.
First Person: So that is your game!
One of the chapters (I think) in the little book was dedicated to a game which Dr Berne entitled "Let's you and him fight." It was about how there are some folks who take delight in fomenting discontent and disputation between others. How about that? There are such folks. The subtext in Berne's message was that those who are wise enough to identify the gambit are then able to decline to play.
I never thought much of Dr Berne (nor of Transactional Analysis, for that matter) but I thought he scored a winner with this observation.
