Releasing the Scapegoat

I should be preparing for a lecture I am giving in fifteen minutes, but my mind keeps going back to Sunday. Standing in the hallway after “Sunday school,” another member came up to me.

“Do you have a minute?”
“Sure man, what’s up?”
“I wanted to ask you about your vote for Obama, do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Because I was interested in Obama, and I would have even voted for him myself, but I wasn’t sure about his character…”
“His character?” I asked quizzically.
“Sure. I mean, with McCain you know what he is about. He is a man of integrity, his record shows that. But what do we know about Obama? Nothing, right? He has no record. Now I think of you as an intelligent person, and I wanted to ask you what you knew about Obama that I didn’t that made you vote for him.”

I find myself going over this conversation again and again, thinking about my response, and the futility of the conversation. I will tell you I don’t think either one of us left satisfied. For myself, I think I was mystified by the word “character.” I am pretty sure I should have asked for a definition before we proceeded. Hindsight is golden.

The category, Obama, for one hundred dollars: what is character Alex?

I talked about the differences between the two candidates, the policies that they supported, the position on the economy, Reganomics…

“But what do you know about his character. I haven’t talked to an Obama supporter yet who can answer this question for me. I am unconvinced.”

Thinking about this argument makes me a little insane. I finally realized that it is because weren’t even talking the same language. I was going to talk policies, and he was going to talk, well, character. Alas, you can win the battle and lose the war as it were.

Driving home, J. asked me what I was thinking about.

School.

In fact, every time I think about this conversation I find myself lapsing into conversation with the graduate faculty. The parallels in my mind are obvious. SO obvious that it only took me three days to realize them. How I can paint my heart out, talk about my art till I am blue in the face, do everything I can to meet the requirements, and never make any headway… We are not talking in the same language.

Usually I think about the first person I asked to chair my committee, M. Sitting in my car I find myself screaming at him. Heaping the tired old conversations that keep pinging around in my head on top of him like they are his entire fault, and if he would only just open his damn eyes my metal anguish would end.

He is a scapegoat. Carrying the sins of the people placed on it and sent away into the wilderness. But I cannot kill my scapegoat. I can only watch helplessly as it prances around my imagination. In Christianity the Jesus is the scapegoat. Heaped with the sins of humanity, he rises again as an innocent, revealing that it is humanity, and not the goat that is the root of the problem.

Sigh. I know, I know. I am the problem. I feel the palm of my hand rubbing into my eye socket. I realize that I am thinking hard about this, oblivious to the world around me. This is all taking place in my head. M. is not the scapegoat here, I think I am.

I knit my brow. I have a kind of “Say my name. Say my name”
“Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden. You freak!” moment, where the warring parts of my personality collide on one another, conversations at church and school amalgamating into one another until they are almost indistinguishable from one another and then pour out onto the head of some other son of a bitch, like Samuel anointing David. Except that, like the characters in my dreams, I have been playing all of the parts in my little play.

How do I kill the scapegoat? Stop being my own whipping boy? Perhaps. But Scapegoating is the act of holding a person, group of people, or thing responsible for a multitude of problems, problems which, for the most part, I have no control over. The Goat is not the problem. He is just the dumb son-of-a-bitch who gets the blame for everything. I think today I need to let him off the hook.