These days, almost every entity, concept, or idea lives-and sometimes dies-on the basis of optics. Visualization is an extension of story-telling, and corporations have learned how vital it has become to tell your story to customers, shareholders, equity analysts, employees, and other significant stakeholders.

So what is United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz’s story about how and why passenger David Dao was rudely and untimely ripped from his less-than-comfortable but paid-for seat, and dragged spread-eagled down that narrow aisle? He was, Munoz said, “belligerent.” Perhaps he really meant to say, “persistent,” channeling Mitch McConnell’s indictment of Elizabeth Warren, and just got it wrong. Perhaps he thought a “belligerent” passenger would summon sympathy for the unfortunate but well-meaning United personnel who were hell-bent to get the show on the road.

Blaming the victim: a problematic, pathetic tactic in the crisis communication playbook that invariably backfires.

A quick review of corporations that have taken this approach reveals a minefield of misbegotten consequences. Recently, there was Toyota, which in 2010 blamed drivers for the claims of unintended acceleration. The company paid the federal government $1.2 billion to avoid going to trial.

In the 1990s, an ABC Primetime segment exposed Food Lion Delhaize, a supermarket chain with strong presence in the Southeastern U.S., of purposely selling food that had gone bad but was re-packaged. For six years, 1992-1998, the company pursued ABC in court, blaming the network for deceptive videotaping. Its reward: the princely sum of $2.00 assessed as damages from the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, the company lost something like 45% of its share price and its market share.

There was the spectacle in 2002 of the one-time accounting giant Arthur Anderson blaming the federal government instead of itself as it fell apart during the Enron scandal.

And in 1996, Mitsubishi USA bused workers to demonstrate against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had accused the company of sexual and racial discrimination on the production line. The result: a national boycott led by Jessie Jackson.

Maybe all of these examples are arcane bits of corporate history, but each of them resulted in heightened media coverage and exposure. And in each incident, management forged ahead with their wrong-headed quest to blame the “other guy.” So, do companies learn? Sometimes; sometimes not. Hello, United Airlines.

Images forge mental associations that are often as solid as cement. The optics of a paying passenger-who is neither white nor Anglo-being dragged off a common carrier brings to mind repeated images of men in I.C.E uniforms carting off undocumented immigrants. And via social media’s unrelenting appetite for reproduction, the first incident becomes associated with the second.