That our sot of a mayor didn't apologize for talking up gin to tykes calls into discussion the value of public apologies. Certainly a host of critics believes he owes one; but are public apologies all that they're held up to be? What's the value of an apology these days?
Rep. Jim Gibbons has spent a good share of his recent time saying sorry—first for calling anyone who opposes corporate donations to Bush "communists"—a remark for which he later squared up with the TV camera and said, "Should I have said that? No. And if I offended anybody in Nevada, I apologize." Not a month later, Gibbons was in the news again regretting himself, this time for stealing, or borrowing from, an anti-liberal speech originally penned by the Alabama state auditor. Sorry.
This comes on top of much ado about a UNLV professor being chastised for speaking on the spending habits of homosexuals, and the university apologizing; and Harvard President Lawrence Summers' ongoing apologies for saying women lack the "intrinsic aptitude" for math and science; and Colorado's Ward Churchill refusing to apologize for comparing 9/11 victims to Nazis.
The art of public apology is an illusory one. Apologies, if they're issued at all, are thrown around like wet-naps to wash one's hands of residue. They're made to seem important, and then are redeemed for very little redemption.
Satirist Ambrose Bierce defined "to apologize" as "to lay the foundation for a future offense." British novelist Baroness Orczy said, "An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be."
Last week alone, while Oscar Goodman danced around apologizing for the gin remark—"Now, it has offended some people. And anybody who knows me knows I would never intentionally offend anybody. ... I'm proud of myself, but at the same time, sometimes you shouldn't answer a question if it's going to be offensive to people"—a doghouse full of other politicians wrestled with the time-tested question, to apologize or not to apologize, and did so with varying amounts of mastery:
• March 3, Indianapolis Star: "House Democrats won't be getting an apology from Gov. Mitch Daniels, who compared them to terrorists earlier this week for refusing to come to the House floor.
"'Not a chance,' Daniels told reporters Thursday. A day earlier, he said the 48 House Democrats had 'car-bombed' bills to reform Indiana's government and spark the state's economy."
• March 4, Nashua, New Hampshire: Mayor Bernie Streeter opted to apologize to a cabdriver for an earlier car collision the mayor caused and then fled without identifying himself. Good call, Bernie.
• On March 2, Butte County Supervisor Jane Dolan of Chico, California, said, "I vote to apologize" to a woman who got the runaround from county planners and ended up with a sticky property disaster on her hands. This is a particularly dashing manner of getting close to, but not too close to, accepting personal responsibility. I vote to apologize.
• A week earlier, on February 22, London Mayor Ken Livingstone decided not to apologize for comparing a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard, opting instead for the roundabout, according to the Associated Press:
"My words were not intended to cause such offense," Livingstone said, adding that he would issue "no apology or expression of regret."
"Upon a further week of reflection in which I have read everything written in the press about this controversy and after considerable debate with many Londoners," the London mayor said, "I have decided to stand by that position."
Can you really get away with saying, I didn't mean to offend you but I'm standing by what I said anyway? If you say it, and you stand by it, then you're clearly willing to offend anyone who'd take offense. Right Mayor Goodman?
Some people are much more earnest. Honorable people who step up and really take the blame for wrong. Like Paris Hilton.
In an interview with Us Weekly last month, Hilton bravely said about her cell phone being hacked into and her friends' phone numbers being stolen, "I want to apologize to all my friends and family. I don't know why this stuff always happens to me, but I wish it wouldn't anymore."
Others—well at least one other—apologize not so much for what comes out of their mouths as for what they put in it. Note this memorable apology from Mike Tyson in 2000: "I shouldn't have done that," he said of the biting off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear. "I was just striking out and it was total hatred right there. I just forgot he was a human being."
And let's put the mayor's dipsomaniac blather in perspective with some other steep demands for apologies going on around the world right now:
• March 3, Dateline Tokyo, AFP: "South Korea demands Japan apologize for colonial rule ..."
• March 4, Dateline North Korea, JoonAng Daily: "North Korea's leadership demanded an apology yesterday from the United States for labeling the communist state an 'outpost of tyranny,' while at the same time saying its military was prepared to resume long-range missile testing. ... The U.S. should apologize for the remarks and withdraw them, renounce its hostile policy."
• And then there's the U.S.'s pitiful sorry for shooting and killing Italy's chief intelligence officer and wounding an Italian journalist escaping Iraq: "The U.S. administration announced their regret for the incident." But they were speeding.
American Theologian Tyron Edwards, 1809-1894, said, "Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past."
Sometimes an apology is meant to do superhuman things with the airy sweep of words. In 2000, Pope John Paul II apologized for 20 centuries of sins made by the Catholic Church.
In subsequent years, the church kept on apologizing, as priests continue to be defrocked for crimes.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology to Japanese-Americans for their internment in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, and paid reparations—$20,000 to each person interned. After World War II, Germany apologized for the Nazi Holocaust and made more than $60 billion in restitution payments.
But still the U.S. government hasn't managed a simple apology for slavery, never mind reparations. President Bill Clinton came only thisclose in 1998, by admitting that the U.S. had not always "done the right thing by Africa."
In light of the present state of the public apology, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the Las Vegas mayor shouldn't apologize for admitting to fourth-graders that he's overly fond of gin. I'll probably need to apologize for this position later. But for now I'd like to say unequivocally that it would be insincere for him to apologize. So why do it? Why add to the pile of tangled rhetoric that the public apology has become?
It's way more sincere for him to equivocate about not meaning to offend. It's no surprise that he said what he said about gin, we know who and what we elected, and I have to wonder why we expected this mayor of Las Vegas to speak in any other way to children in the first place.