Get Your Goat!

We need a bigger goat.
Much bigger.
We need an oversized patsy, a certified whipping boy, a forty-foot fall guy.
Any suggestions?
Sorry, local officials won’t do this time. You can only get so much mileage out of taking pot shots at poor Dicky Quintal, or demeaning Larry Rosenblum, or adding snide comments about any elected official whose name appears online.
Local Government as a whole is the proverbial broad side of the barn: hard to miss but in the end, not quite what the people require at this historic moment.
AIG?
Sure, Aiggie and its stooges - and the other oversized financial institutions as well, are an ever bigger, fatter target. But personally I can’t relate to a trillion dollar company and its billion dollar blues. And then there’s the sad fact that we need AIG, and Wall Street, and all those banks. So to make financial institutions the sole target of our anger and frustration is just, well, spitting into the wind.
What about the Commander in Chief? The President always makes a nice fall guy. But this guy Obama has the unusual habit (for a politician) of apologizing when he makes a mistake. It took the last guy six years to even admit to making any mistakes at all.
And speaking of the ‘last guy’, let’s get it out the way: we can’t blame him either. It would be giving him more credit than he deserves to say he was personally responsible for our present state of affairs. In eight years he really didn’t do much of anything, except flash that famous grin as the world around him went to hell.
Okay, so where was I? Oh yeah, looking for that oversized goat.
Did you know the term ‘scapegoat’ comes from the tradition, in Biblical times, of driving off a goat with the sins of the world loaded (symbolically) on to its back? The ‘escape’ goat or, "scapegoat" is now understood to mean a person, often innocent, who is punished for the sins of others (usually as a way of distracting attention from the real causes.)
Whatever happened to the Red Chinese anyway?
When I was a boy you could always blame the Red Chinese or the Soviets if you were feeling a little anxious. In my Dad’s time they had the Rosenbergs. In my grandfather’s time there was Sacco and Vanzetti. Say what you will, but I don’t think that Tim Geithner measures up against those great goats of the past.
Still I would agree that a good show trial might make us feel better, for a time. We could put Dick ‘Chainsaw’ Cheney in charge: he’s just the man if you’re planning to burn someone at the stake.
But even if we waterboarded a few Wall Street execs, put a little buckshot in the behinds of a select group of politicians, and tarred and feathered anyone suspected of eating imported pistachios, the effects would be short-lived. And we still wouldn’t be able to rid ourselves of the nagging suspicion that it was – not AIG or Notorious B.I.G., it was you and me who were responsible for this fall from grace.
That’s the secret of successful scapegoating too: it’s got to be our apathy, our sloth, our sins that are offloaded onto something or someone else in order to achieve the full effect. Most of your modern scapegoats - even Dick Darth Cheney, just don’t have enough trunk space to accommodate all of that.
Remember, we’re not talking about the sins of a few; we’re talking about, like Mikey Jackson used to sing, “the man in the mirror”.
We were the ones that were too complacent to fight against the waste of Iraq. We were the ones who were too busy fishing from our new boats – bought with a little ol’ equity loan on our overvalued homes, to get out and vote. We were the ones who were too fat and happy to care that our country was being split down the middle into the haves and the have-just-enough-not-to-cares. And heck, let’s not be chauvinistic about this: our friends in Europe and Asia had their own personal Ponzi schemes too.
Even those among us whose heads weren’t completely buried in the sand for the last decade, usually had them buried someplace else. Can we be forgiven for the hours and hours, and hours spent role-playing in World of Warcraft, or fine-tuning our MySpace pages, and text messaging our friends while the walls crumbled around us?
Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but a lot of us Twittered while America tottered.
So if we all have played a part in this debacle - and it’s not just the fault of some remote corporation or government official or Brittany, we need a scapegoat the likes of which has not been seen for years.
And come to think of it, I know just the guy: that is, I know just the goat.
There is one all-purpose, super-sized, professional, time-tested, certified scapegoat who has the ability to take on all of our guilt and anger and frustration and blame, and do so without complaint.
Yes, I know it sounds blasphemous, but I think we really need to make a big sacrifice if we are going to get out of this hole we’re in without tearing each other to pieces.
Let the call go out.
Billy Buckner, we need you again!