Mea freakin' culpa, already!

In the largely unlamented Altman film "Popeye," one of Olive Oyl's siblings, Cole Oyl, finding offense the way a pig finds truffles, tells nearly everyone he meets, "You owe me an apology!"

It was an odd but harmless bit of shtick, part of the muttering and cross-talk that was a signature of the old Fleischer cartoons on which the Altman version is lovingly based, and part of the reason that Altman was the ideal director to create that doomed work.

For reasons that are definitely not worth going into now, I spent a fair amount of time researching the theory and practice of the public apology while I was in grad school. (Note that this research was in the interest of knowledge for knowledge's sake, not the result of any practical requirement on my part.)

And it's precisely because, even at many years' remove, I have a certain interest and expertise regarding on this whole topic, that I feel I'm the perfect person to make this plea:

Enough, already! Enough with the demanding apologies!

Everywhere you turn, some public figure, some group is demanding an apology from someone, or someone's demanding it on their behalf. This incident is only the latest:

Bill O'Reilly Needs Help
Fox host demands Letterman apologize for pointing out Fox host's inaccuracy

11/3/06

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly and CBS talk show host David Letterman had a well-publicized showdown on Letterman's program in early January, so it came as no surprise that their next face-to-face on October 27 would be similarly heated. After the interview aired, O'Reilly accused Letterman of dishonesty for accurately saying O'Reilly had lied on his show, and challenged Letterman to produce the evidence.

And it should come as a surprise to no one that, when FAIR found Letterman to be blameless, they immediately insisted that O'Reilly should (wait for it) apologize to him.

Thus did the O'Reilly-Letterman dust-up join the parade of recent incidents for which putatively aggrieved partisans have fervently, sself-righteously insisted that someone should most definitely apologize to someone, including:

• John Kerry's fluffed Iraq joke


• George Bush's placing our troops needlessly at risk
  


• The Dixie Chicks' pointing this out


• The Dixie Chicks' apologizing for pointing this out
  


• Rush Limbaugh's mocking of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms


• Donald Rumsfeld's utter botching of the Iraq war


• Republican Senate candidate George Allen's "macaca" crack


• Allen opponent Jim Webb's attack on Allen for the "macaca" crack


• Idaho Governor Jim Risch's emergency elk hunt


• Canadian PM Stephen Harper's broken promise not to tax trusts, and even


• The Cards' World Series victory

( . . . Wait a minute--how did that last one get in there again?)

Is it just me, or has this been happening more and more lately? Is this now an obligatory item on the Clipboard of Political Cheap Shots?

No, on reflection, it's definitely not just me.

Even if you sincerely believe that any of these actions was wrong, the current apology craze will get you no justice.

As in the apocryphal LBJ pig story, the point of this self-righteous victimology is not--is never--to set matters right from a moral standpoint; it's to watch Them squirm. The demand is invariably meaningless--little more than high school tit-for-tat--and so any apology, even if tendered, becomes just as meaningless under the circumstances. That's especially true when it's a standard non-apology apology, along the tautological lines of "I'm really sorry that the insult I directed toward my opponents was interpreted by them as insulting."

So just stop it, everyone. Just . . . stop.

It's utterly insincere, it's just one more way that political (and polite) discourse is being cheapened, and someone should apologize immediately.

Sorry if I lost my temper there.