The Name of the Game Is Blame

I’d like to take this opportunity to say goodbye to former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams and to remind him that all the crimes committed on the streets of the city during his tenure were his fault.

I don’t imagine the accusation bothers him much since he is walking away with $375,000 jingling in his pocket and the right to anything free he can get his hands on in Las Vegas without answering to anyone.

But, still, it’s got to be something of a burden knowing that everything evil that occurred in the past five years within the municipal boundaries, from petty theft to mass murder, will be loaded onto his back.

That’s not my idea exactly, it’s just the Good Old American Way to blame whoever’s in charge for whatever goes wrong in a given jurisdiction. Until the day she died, for instance, my mother blamed J. Edgar Hoover for the Great Depression. She meant Herbert, of course, but I wasn’t going to risk a slap in the mouth by correcting her.

Ultimately, as we assess his administration, the blame for whatever went wrong during the years Willie was in power will probably shift back and forth from the Chief to the Council to the Mayor and finally fall on the narrow, trembling shoulders of you-know-who. Right, us. The media.

Even Williams hints that his own problems were partially based on members of the press nipping at his heels like crazed Chihuahuas just because he got comped for some rooms in Vegas. If we had only left him alone. . . .

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What brings the subject of blame to mind is a telephone call I received over the weekend from a woman who said there was a movement afoot to recall Mayor Richard Riordan, whom she blamed for getting rid of Willie Williams.

I explained to her that while he might have influenced the effort, Riordan was not personally responsible for bouncing the Chief out the door and down the steps of Parker Center. That was the job of the Police Commission.

I also pointed out that any recall movement might be hindered by the Mayor’s popularity. He won reelection by an overwhelming majority and since then has done nothing visibly wrong to alter the public’s opinion of him. In fact, I don’t think he’s done anything at all.

That, by the way, is the very essence of popularity, doing nothing at all or undertaking projects so innocuous that even if they go wrong, no one is going to remember them. If nothing’s done, there’s no one to blame.

The anonymous caller hung up when I refused to join her Recall Club but I thought I knew who she was and made a return telephone call to an activist known as the Mad Dog of Canoga Park.

I realized instantly it wasn’t her, however, because she has gone through a metamorphosis and instead of firing blame from the hip the way she used to she is now willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

“Who knows who’s to blame?” she said in her new, sweet spirit of equanimity. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear so I hung up. The Kingdom of Blame tolerates no deserters.

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We can’t discuss blame without mentioning Marcia Clark, whose new Book of Blame, “Without a Doubt,” has just reached a store near you. Clark, you may recall, was on the losing end of the O.J. Simpson case, a situation rewarded with a $4.2-million deal with Viking to tell us all what went wrong.

I browsed through “W.A.D.” to learn that it wasn’t Clark or her team that failed to convict Simpson, it was sloppy police work, Judge Lance Ito, her ex-husband and me. She blamed everyone but God and a barking dog.

When I say Marcia also blamed me I’m speaking, of course, as a representative of the media, even though I only wrote twice on the subject during the entire trial. However, I cannot escape association with those whose sole concentration was Marcia’s hairdo, the length of her skirts and whether or not she was romantically involved with Christopher Darden. Blame us for that.

Everyone has joined in the blame game, so why not Marcia Clark? We blame zookeepers when elephants die, educators when kids can’t read, immigrants when the economy falters, coaches when a team loses, and police chiefs when gang members shoot each other up on the street.

Assuming responsibility for our own actions is no longer a popular pastime. Blaming is easier, more fun and less involving. But in the end, to blame others for a society in chaos is to blame a mirror for our own ugliness. What we’re seeing is only a reflection of what we’ve become.

And I blame us all for that.

Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected].