On Point

It's closing in on a year since Matthew Perry's death... and the trail of blame unravels: the unscrupulous doctors and enablers, the greedy parasites who attach themselves to celebrities who are emotionally disabled.  I've seen this-- rockstars who struggle, actors between successes hanging out in bars, drinking themselves into a kind of crippled charisma.  It has an appeal, this state of manic hilarity, of self-effacing confessional deprecations and desperate nightly dramas of carousing.  While some pick up their career and dust themselves off, all too often this ends in tragedy.  It's very hard to measure quantities of alcohol or meds when one is just intent on blurring out the demons.  The failure we fear is too often simply the fear of failure. It's complicated.

Still, in the very sensitive aftermath of a tragic death, there is unprecedented sympathy.  Where were these mourners and criers during crisis?  Matthew was not in an appealing state, and I've argued in vain (pun intended) with addicts and junkies at the midnight hour when nothing but a needle makes any sense.  But after the fact, as a sort of clearance for the victim, there is this blame game... sometimes valid, sometimes a consolation narrative.  Where life insurance is concerned, there is a financial reason to morph a suicide into an accident or a manslaughter scenario.

And then there is the chain reaction-- those who are on a kind of edge and are so derailed by the sad ending of someone who struggled, as they do-- especially when that person was a 'someone' whom they admired.  If this man couldn't manage, one thinks, how can a loser like me ever get clean or sober or 'happy'-- that evasive human nirvana?

Granted, there was a hideous sequence of heinous people who profited from the pseudo-medical art of prescription peddling, especially common among well-known people who want to keep their vices within a more private circle.  But it helps to exonerate the deceased and attribute his errors to an evil little machine of individuals which took away his choices.  The consistent popularity of Law and Order and varieties of Dateline exemplifies our human obsession with blame-attribution.  We want justice for the innocent, and we often want the guilty ones we love to seem less guilty. The dead cannot defend themselves; we must unravel and discover.  

While I find mass shootings (and all random shootings) horrifying, I'm not sure the gun makers are culpable.  For someone strangled with a silk tie, well-- nearly anything in the wrong hands can be transformed into a means of killing.  Of course guns are made for this... and what is wrong with our culture and all past cultures which decided that wounding human bodies was a way of solving massive conflicts? All guns aside, it was God Himself who weaponized rain in Genesis. 'The fire next time,' He warned, in the traditional spiritual which inspired the James Baldwin title.  This always frightened me, like a premonition of firearms, nuclear war.  Summer wildfires are terrifying enough.

We named my very first band The Blame.  Blame it on rock and roll; something like that.  Blame and guilt go hand in hand in adolescence, in bad relationships, in family dynamics.  We grow up pointing fingers... even the dog gets involved as the fallguy-- eating homework, breaking expensive china, etc.  And then there was the pandemic-- the ultimate culprit in stalemating lives, creativity, social connections.  It caused depression, isolation... it had no end, no boundary... for many of my peers this became a new way of living. Come to think of it, was not the great flood of Genesis the ultimate cancel-culture event?  

August always brings with it a kind of nostalgic regret-- the end of summer is sad for children; they must go back to the grind of school, and leave the freedom of unscheduled days and jacket-less afternoons.  We adults carry this with us... the cusp of September seems always harsh for me... as though I no longer deserve a day of respite, of freedom.  We are grown ups-- we must take responsibility for our failures and lapses. Jews have a day of atonement; I wonder how many in Israel will be thinking about the Palestinians whose children will be vaccinated against polio, but destroyed as a people. It's downright ironic, this priority to cease warfare just to insure that these babies in the line of fire are inoculated. 

Not to deny the back-and-forth between our political candidates. Leaders are generally held responsible for the ills of their regime, but the blame game goes far beyond culpability in an election year. Finger pointing and accusations far eclipse the vulnerable reality of policies which are only as solid as theory or hindsight witnesses. We are all to blame for sins of omission, for selfishness, for failing to reach out and empathize.  Too often the burden gets transferred and passed down to the one who has least power to defend.  Like the tastelessly loud guitarists who blame their sound crew-- the venue-- acoustics-- or band members for volume issues. All we have are tools of prevention, and our own hearts and minds which will hopefully embrace some kind of universal truth and move this world forward into not just a foreseeable but an accountable future.