Scapegoats

[Originally written May 23, 2007]

You might want to read this before reading this note. Disclaimer: It's a pretty gross story:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/05/20/baby.in.microwave.ap/index.html

Ah, scapegoats. Fall guys. Where would our society be without them? Here's what I think their greatest contribution is: They allow people to continue doing business with those they know are corrupt/assholes/guilty, while not openly doing business with the bastards in question. It allows someone who regularly has to do some type of business with a horrible-but-necessary person to continue that business.

Here's an example: imagine a politician from a state where oil transport/drilling is a major industry taking millions of dollars in contributions from the oil industry. Now imagine that there's a major oil spill. From the point of view of someone who has to get re-elected, he has to speak out against it. From the point of view of someone who needs those millions, he has to make the issue about something else. So what would you do in this case? If I were a conservative, I'd find the smallest infraction by whatever government regulation group was supposed to be overseeing the safety at that site and rail against them. I'd talk repeatedly about the failure of expensive government oversight groups (forgetting that I was a part of that government) when compared to deregulated private safety corporations. From a liberal viewpoint, I might blame a low-level individual at the drilling company. Either way, you get your contribution and the conditions for the spill are still allowed to exist. Did I forget to mention that it might be expensive for your buddies in the oil industries to make their sites safer and more environmentally sound? So the scapegoat is government or some low-level worker no one will miss. When it should have been your site for fucking up in the first place.

I've just re-read that paragraph, and two things strike me about it: I have really got to start working on my examples, and that it's kind of politically cynical, in that the problem isn't fixed by either approach but the final one, which is blogistically boring.

Here's a quick "cynicism test": When you read the paragraph above, did you think I was abstracting from a true political story, or making one up?

I made it up. But if you believed it could be true, that tells you a lot about how you view politics. By the way, I apologize for the poorly-thought-out example, but the cynical part comes from years of observing the outcomes of political "events".

I am a relative newcomer to working in an office, but I've noticed that office politics come in to play a lot. I'm lucky to have friends who don't play inter-personal "political" games, or at least I'm insensitive enough to be able to tell them to rise above the shit caused by unnecessary and useless drama. This has led me to this belief: everything, if you try hard enough, can be politicized.
Take marriage, for example. It's a fairly common thing, it happens to many people throughout the course of their lives. You'd think that it wouldn't be easy to politicize the love between two people. Isn't it a personal thing? Until politicians started railing against gay marriage. Suddenly tons of voters, rather than ignoring the morons who were trying to convince them that this was important, actually thought it was important. Let me spell out the stupidity of this to you:

if...other...people...get...married...it...doesn't...affect...your...marriage. At all. Not even a little. Unless, in some weird way, two guys loving each other makes you love your significant other less. In which case you don't deserve her, let her find someone who's more stable.

But in a lot of cases, it worked. Gays and lesbians became the distracting concept in a debate that should have been about the candidates and the issues. Scapegoats.

That's not even the largest scapegoat concept. I'd say that the largest scapegoat in world history is religion. Bear with me now...

The Crusades: thousands (millions?) of people killed, religion blamed.

The Inquisition: millions killed, cultures destroyed, countless priceless historical artifacts and sites destroyed and lost forever, religion blamed.

Israel/The Middle East: I'll write about theologically-based states later. Needless to say, they've proven themselves to not work very well no matter where they are in the world, or what religion they're based on. Suffice to say, religion blamed.

Those are the big, historical ones. What about the little ones? The Jonestown Massacre. The Waco thing. The unending and unfortunate progression of Christian-vs.-Freemason thriller books.

The article I recommended at the beginning of this post is about a quote from a woman who says, basically, that her husband was forced by Satan to put their daughter into a microwave because he [Satan] was scared of the idea of her husband becoming a minister.

In other words, her husband was an abusive, homicidal lunatic who injured their daughter in a disgusting and horrifying way. And she's scapegoating religion, saying that it's not his fault.

It is his fault. If we take the Christian religion as a truth for the sake of argument, there are several logical problems (yes, in addition to that). One is that the whole basis of creation is that God gave man free will and the ability to exercise it. That's why so many stories have been written, in the Bible and outside it, about the Devil tempting people and them ultimately resisting it. Because we are able to. Because we CAN.

So if this guy is going to be as incredible a preacher as she claims he will be, you'd think that denying the Devil would be fairly easy, yeah? It's got to be easy to have faith if you want to lead people willing to follow a fairy tale. She thought this guy would be so good that the Devil was scared of him. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Devil supposed to be some sort of ultimate badass? This guy must have been really good. So either: (a) this guy wasn't so good, and so the Devil wasn't scared of him, or (2) she's a fucking lunatic, too.

See there's this thing that's puzzled philosophers for years called The Problem of Evil. It basically states that God can either be omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), or omni-benevolent (all-good), but not all three. If he's all-knowing, he is aware that evil is in the world. If he's aware of it and doesn't do anything about it, he's not all-good. If he's aware of it and can't do anything about it, he's not all-powerful. One of the three has to be wrong. I'm not sure (and I'm hoping someone will correct me on this), but I think this is where Nietzsche came up with the idea that God is dead.

George Bush led Congress to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and scapegoated "bad intelligence" when they found out he was full of shit. They were able to keep working with him rather than rising up and slaying him. Eva Mauldin scapegoated (if such a word exists) religion when her husband did something terrible, and can therefore convince herself that he's still a good man.
There's enough blame already; whatever happened to responsibility?