Blame’s the game

Blame’s the game

Sonia Kelly

Just about the most important ploy you can use to counteract the injurious aspects of life is the blame game. Lawyers figured out a long time ago that attack is the best method of defence and so it must be, even in their absence. Even in the absence of dialogue, i.e. in your own mind. In other words, guilt should never be accepted, as the loss of self-esteem will result.
Let me give a few examples: shortly after acquiring Tiger the battery ran down, so his surgeon had to come out from town to start him. This he did, and went off, leaving the engine running. I proceeded to follow him, noticing en route that a new yellow light had appeared on the dash board. Half way to town the engine stalled and refused to re-start. A kind man working near by came and puzzled with me, but offered no solution. I had to hitch-hike in and get the surgeon back. The problem? Too much choke! I’m sure you can imagine his opinion of me. But - heck - I’m not a mechanic, it’s men who are the experts. Why didn’t the man who had tried to help know? Wasn’t he the one really to blame?
Then there was the radio debacle. A certain radio station had invited me to come on board for a weekly phone-in discussion to expand on the content of this very column. For some obscure reason I agreed, although no money was on offer. The designated time subsequently fluctuated in what indicated chaotic planning and was often inconvenient. However, I didn’t complain and the arrangement seemed established.
But, lo and behold, one fine day, after adjusting my schedule in accordance with instructions, nothing happened. There was no phone call - not a sound to break the silence of an hour’s vigil by the instrument! Now, imagine how deeply humiliating this felt. I immediately concluded that numbers of listeners had called the station telling them to remove that idiot from the air waves. When I had calmed down a bit, though, I realised that I had never met a single person who had ever heard of the station, let alone listened to it, so that was hardly the reason for annihilation. No, it had to be that such a Mickey Mouse outfit couldn’t afford to hire people with enough savvy to know that common courtesy decreed that it was habitual to inform contributors if their input had run its course.
So that took care of that potentially demoralising episode.
But another similarly offensive occurrence concerned an invitation to dinner chez moi, when two of those invited declined on the grounds that the conversation of the other guests would be unlikely to be of sufficient interest. Didn’t that infer that I and my friends were culchies? It was like a kick in the solar plexus. I was stunned for 24 hours, until someone pointed out that the behaviour of such people could only be blamed on their own bog ancestry and that their conversation would be unlikely to stimulate the rest of us.
Once again my personality was saved from dissolution by the correct apportion of blame.
Talking of these adverse circumstances reminded me of the difficulty of defining the word ‘forgive’. Now it has come to me that it is best translated as ‘forego’, i.e. forego the pleasure of hating the perpetrator, like you might forego the pleasure of scoffing a box of chocolates, knowing that it would subsequently cause you harm - which is not to say that the previous examples engendered quite such extreme emotion.
But enough to require the same solution ...