"The President in particular is very much a figurehead--he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it."
Adams, Douglas. "The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide" Avenel, New Jersey. Longmeadow Press, 1993.
If you are wondering why I chose this quote to open up my thoughts on blame, I'm sure a particular former U.S. President will quickly come to mind. Many people think I am an ardent Bill Clinton supporter because I always oppose the "Clinton Bashers" who have found numerous ways to compare him with the Anti-Christ, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and a Really Sleazy Guy. It never ceases to amaze me how great some people's hatred for our former President has grown with each passing day. People blame him for the current corporate scandals, they blame him for the 9/11 attacks, they blame him for the sudden drop in our economy, they blame him for EVERYTHING that is currently wrong with our society. I say this is a huge load of horsehockey and buckpassing at its best.
First clue: our former president is a politician. We elected him not once, but twice because he said exactly what we wanted to hear and quite frankly, we were tired of a bunch of "old men" in the White House. We wanted someone new, fresh, young, charismatic, and exciting as President; like it or not, these are qualities Bill Clinton has in spades. I think we are quite familiar with the idea that politicians are not exactly the most honest people in the world. They make far more promises than they can ever keep; that's the nature of politics: the distribution of scarce resources. Many people do not understand the kinds of deals and trades that have to go on quietly behind the scenes to get any piece legislation through both Houses of Congress and signed on the President's desk, yet when things are going well, we like our President. When things are not going so well, we hate him. Much of what Bill Clinton did while in public office is completely normal for a President, the only difference is that this time, some jealous Republicans who were pretty upset that a Democrat "stole" the White House from them in 1992 decided to keep digging into Clinton's private life until they found something they could use against him publicly. When they felt they had enough dirt, after spending more than 70 MILLION DOLLARS of our taxpayer money, they tried to impeach him, convict him, find him guilty, and in all ways vilify him before the American People. They knew that they didn't actually have to convict Clinton of anything, the implications and the charges, and his own big mouth would do enough damage that the Democrats would lose the next election. Besides, if they actually went through with a Presidential Impeachment, whose to say someone won't decide to start digging up dirt on any one of them? The whole thing couldn't have gone off more smoothly, the "spin doctors" made Clinton out to be a scumbucket (which he is) and everyone bought tickets to the Clinton Bashing parade. If we were to investigate every politician in Washington D.C. I guarantee that we'd find that all of them lied, cheated, stole, and defrauded the American people in one way or another, we simply don't ever learn about it because, for the most part, we really don't want to know. I'm relatively certain that if we investigated and charged all the politicians guilty of sexual misconduct, lying, cheating, and fraud, we wouldn't have enough left to run the government! In Bill Clinton's case, someone decided to air out his dirty laundry for him. In my mind, the way Bill Clinton has been treated is typically hypocritical of a fickle and often emotional public who bought into right-wing propaganda because it gave them someone to blame and someone to hate particuarly now that things aren't going as peachy as they were before. Nobody, especially me is denying that Bill Clinton is a liar, a cheat, a sleaze, an adulterer, (and who knows what else), but for the sake of everything that is sane, he's a politician, that's what politicians do!
The Blame Game has been going on for quite some time. We blamed Germany for plunging us into First World War, and instead of helping her rebuild, we helped impose crushing reparations on her, thinking this would keep her from ever starting any trouble again. Of course it had the opposite effect and, once again, we had to stop the German war machine from enveloping Europe in totalitarianism. After the Second World War, we helped rebuild Germany into a vast financial and industrial nation in her own right. The same can be said of Japan. We failed in China and Indochina, but that had much more to do with political issues than it did blaming. When Communism became the "Great Evil Specter," we blamed them for all that was wrong with the world and justified all sorts of human atrocities from petty tyrants around the world "…as long as they weren't dreaded Communists!" We used nations like Iran, Iraq, Japan, Cuba, West Germany, Norway, Iceland, South Korea, South Vietnam, Canada, Israel, Saudi-Arabia, the Philippines, as well as supporting anti-Communist forces in Central and South America to utilize as spying and staging areas to keep an "eye" on world communism. We even supported Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980's and dropped them like a bad habit once the Soviets were pushed back into their own territory. Is it no wonder that a bunch of greedy warlords took advantage of the power vaccume there to create a totalitarian theocracy, or that the rebels we trained and supplied ended up very bitter because we helped them defeat the Soviets and essentially abandoned them?
Now Afghanistan is in the center of attention again. This poor backwater nation was in the hands of petty tyrants and warlords for nearly two decades and nobody seemed to give a damn about it, until three jet airliners were flown into buildings and a fourth crashed into the ground. Now all of the sudden it's a "National Priority," and we're going to get Al-Quada, the Taliban, and the "Axis of Evil" if it takes G.W. Bush to get out and push! We were handed a "ready made enemy," someone to hate, someone to seek justice from, we need Osama Bin Laden to blame for this atrocity (of course a lot of people blame Bill Clinton for not dealing with the problem earlier). Thus the blame game continues.
A major corporation is indicted for inflating the cost of electricity after it collapses and thousands of its employees lose all their retirement money. The CEO's and VP's blame their accountants. The accountants blame them back, somebody destroyed evidence, nobody goes to jail. Everybody on the top gets their money out before the bubble bursts and all the "little guys" have to keep working past retirement age because their life savings is gone. Suddenly, like pulling a string out of a tapestry, other corporations are falling apart due to false reporting of financial gains designed to improve their stock positions. Again, the blame game is in full swing.
We have all heard the horror story of a Texas mother of five who just as pretty as you please took all five of her children into the bathroom one-by-one and systematically drowned them in order to "…keep them from Satan." We look at this woman with mixed amounts of contempt and pity. We all thought that she could not be sane, that she was the victim of some sort of mental disorder, that her husband, O.B. GYN, and psychiatrist should have known better about this situation. Someone should have known she was a danger to herself and her children before this thing happened. Yet she was found mentally competent and she was convicted in a court of law by a jury of her peers (only in Texas) to life in prison (she was spared the death penalty because there was at least some doubt as to her mental state). Many people thought she should have been given the death penalty for killing five innocent children. Others thought she needed psychiatric care, not jail time. Some think it would be more merciful to kill her rather than let her spend the rest of her life locked up for murdering her children. We all want to believe she must be insane, because nobody in their right mind would do such a horrible thing.
A few years back, a couple of troubled teens decided that they were going to commit suicide in a spectacular fashion. They hatched a plan to blow up and shoot up their local high school in one of the most spectacular and horrifying displays of youth gone wild. Columbine shocked the nation to its very core. We all felt such pain and despair for the people who died and anger for the teens who caused the tragedy. We began to speculate as to who was to blame. The parents, teachers, administrators, the gun industry, the video game industry, the movie industry, the music industry, the internet…all these and more were the target of blame for the rampage that cost us so much sanity and life. We NEEDED a reason, a rationalization for this barbaric and senseless event. We had to have someone to fix the blame on for this irrational act, when in fact the reason it is considered an irrational act is EXACTLY BECAUSE there is no clear cut reason or cause.
A mother claims her car was stolen with her babies in the back by a black man in the South. She convincingly tells the story several times in public and people believe her. They finally find the car in a local lake with the children still strapped into their seats. The story becomes incredulous when we discover that the mother knowingly drowned her children because the man she was interested in having an extramarital affair with wasn't interested in raising someone else's kids. We blame this woman for her callousness, we question her sanity, and we wonder why the husband or her family didn't know what was going on, we look for a rational explanation for why people do what they do because to us it makes no sense. Again we look for someone or something to blame for irrational behavior when irrational behavior is to blame.
The blame game comes in the form of bizarre lawsuits. An old lady in Florida wins a settlement from a fast food chain because she didn't realize the coffee she got from the drive through would be hot. A man who smoked cigarettes for 60 years wins a settlement from the tobacco industry because he now has emphysema lung cancer. The list goes on and on. We blame others for our own choices and misfortunes just as quickly as we want to take the credit when things are going our way. We support one side of events and downplay or vilify others. Whenever something goes wrong, there is always a scapegoat to be found. Imagine if instead of fixing the blame any time there was a problem, we just fixed the problem? I know I'm living in a fantasy world. Fixing the problem is too expensive and sensible to be taken seriously by anyone, but a man can dream, can't he?
We have evolved into a nation of whiners. We complain about everything. We see problems and then immediately look for someone to blame for them. If there is a problem somewhere, you can be certain that someone is guilty of creating it, and if nobody can be found, then there's always Bill Clinton.