You step on someone's foot. I'm sorry. Hear that a friend's pet has died. I'm so sorry. Spill a drink at a party. Sorry! Spit on a man in front of millions, then suggest it's his fault, because his son's death has made him bitter and mean.
No comment.
Welcome to the sorry state of the apology, when regrets seem to come most readily when they matter the least.
The apology has become the peso of modern rhetoric, a sentiment devalued by virtue of being offered so automatically and unfeelingly. "The apology too prompt," John Milton called it in "Paradise Lost."
Yet when circumstances would seem to demand a heartfelt and sincere admission of error, we clam up, suddenly uncomfortable with subject-verb-object construction: I regret that I did this to you.
Sorry, no can do. In this country, we long ago took the me out of mea culpa. We prefer that famed political motto of the Reagan administration: Mistakes were made. Your high school English teacher be damned, the Great Communicator proved once and for all that passive voice has its uses.
St. Francis of Assisi wrote: Where there is injury, let me grant pardon. John Wayne spoke (in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon"): Never apologize, never explain. No contest here. We're saddling up with the Duke and the Gipper.
Apologies come to mind because umpire John Hirschbeck is in town today. It will be his first appearance at Camden Yards since last summer's contretemps with Oriole Roberto Alomar and the liquid shot seen 'round the world. The spitting "incident."
Must we rehash it here? Sorry, we must. Hirschbeck called a strike in an important game against the Toronto Blue Jays. Alomar said it was a ball. Angry words were spoken, heard by only a few. Spit went flying, seen by millions. Then Alomar broke half of John Wayne's rule -- he tried to explain: It was, he said, Hirschbeck's fault. Over the past six months, in public statements, the two men have indicated they wish to put this ugly event behind them. Still, there was some effort to stage a national "awwwwwwwwwww" moment today -- closure for us, if not for them -- but it doesn't look likely.
If the Alomar-Hirschbeck rapprochement were to be achieved, it would only be the latest in a growing apology fad. The Baptists apologize to the descendants of American slaves. Hungary's bishops apologize for the "weaknesses" of church members that allowed Jews to be deported and slaughtered during the Holocaust. Howard Stern apologizes, en espanol, for offending Selena's fans. Mark Applewhite apologizes for his father, Marshall, who led 38 of his followers in the mass suicide of the "Heaven's Gate" cult.
