Fake Apologies

I’m tired of fake apologies.

I’ve seen so many recently from celebrities, and I could so easily take the word recently out of that statement. But I feel like I’m getting better at recognizing them. The word “but” is often the most obvious clue, invoking the conventional wisdom that nothing that precedes the word “but” ever matters. The problem is finding all the implied buts.

Every time I hear, “I apologize to anyone who was offended,” I can hear the “but” that follows that phrase. But this is ridiculous. But you’re all overreacting. But you shouldn’t have let it bother you in the first place. The fake apology has moved the actual inciting act into the head of the viewer: our problems began when you chose to become so upset. This is part of a larger pattern of the fake apology, it’s always trying to re-write what happened.

This is why it’s different from an insincere apology where one says the minimum required words without meaning them. In my childhood I was often accused of flippantly saying “Sorry” like the problem was solved. But even an insincere apology admits something happened. The fake apology changes everything, with complete sincerity.

The Subtle Shifts

What bothered me so much about Kevin Spacey’s apology is that he very sincerely said “sorry” to an accusation of multiple actual crimes for any of which there was no possibility of redress. Your big sister can make you put back a stolen candy bar, but you really can’t restore the violation of trust and ownership of their own sexuality to someone. (They may be able to, but you never will.) There was something smug about diminishing it to something for which he felt he owed a verbal apology. I don’t know what was in his head, but his need to apologize implied kind words were enough.

But it gets worse. The Spacey apology had a quick pivot to his coming out announcement and finally unraveling the mystery of whether he was in fact, queer all this time. The question pivoted to whether Kevin Spacey likes men (not exactly a surprise), rather than the more disturbing question of whether Kevin Spacey likes adolescent boys. It even felt like he apologized to Rapp like the 48-year old peer he is now, rather than the 14-year old boy he was at the time of “the incident”. Burying his apology in the context of his narrative about being a gay man also helped morph it into a story about a man misreading another gay man, and not a man who prefers kids who can’t stand up to him.

And “the incident” is a great phrase. Something happened. Third person neutral. Much like passive voice, there’s no agency, no instigator. An incident occurred. Spacey did apologize for his behavior, but placed it squarely in the realm of alcohol-induced fugue he can no longer remember. If only he hadn’t had that drink. His apologists will also question why a 14-year old Rapp was left in the care of a randy drunk after an party of all adults. It’s a question that occurred to me, but I started to realize it was subtly shifting the point of blame. If an adult hadn’t left Rapp, if Spacey hadn’t had too much to drink, would it have happened? Were they set on a collision course by these earlier seemingly trivial decisions? Not really, no. But apologizing for drunken behavior slides so easily into apologizing for being drunk, not for what you actually did. One drink too many colliding with one vulnerable boy too many, in the wrong place at the wrong time, like some sort of sexual predator eclipse that would never be repeated in our lifetime.

“The incident” is a phrase that confines behavior to a moment in time, deep in the fog of distant memory. Except in Spacey’s case we found out it really wasn’t. Everyone else started telling their stories, and it wasn’t an momentary eclipse of his powers of judgment, empathy, and decency. He didn’t turn into a werewolf then turn back into a man, he kept doing this, sober and aware, as he grew older and his influence as an actor and director and administrator grew ever greater. That importance of time-shifting comes up in so many fake apologies: I’m not that guy anymore. Blame him, that guy in the past, not me. I regret this one singular incident you found out about, and secretly hope to all that is holy none of the other “isolated incidents” will ever come to light.

There’s a phrase that often goes with “the incident”, which is a personal favorite: “I used poor judgment.” It’s impossible to hear about it without thinking, “Did you really now? Thanks for clearing that up.” That sounds like something any of us could do. Poor judgment was the problem for the model who posted a horrified selfie showing off an overweight woman in the shower at her gym. (I don’t even want to look up her name and let web spiders find it anymore.) It also turned out this was meant to be shared with a friend so the two of them could laugh at a fat stranger, but then she accidentally hit the wrong button and shared it with the world, where it went viral. For a minute she had me realizing that so many things were not really her malicious fault, like hitting the wrong button and the fact that the nasty people of the internet of course ran away with the photo and plastered it everywhere. She was mostly apologizing for hitting the wrong button.

Empathy vs Scorn

Sometimes I read these fake apologies and I even feel something that’s not quite sympathy for these people. I’d hear these stories and wonder if I would ever find myself at the precipice of temptation and slip the wrong way for just a moment and lose my whole life over it. Especially when the internet holds on to everything forever. I say dumb stuff all the time, sometimes the first step to changing my thinking is to express it out loud and hear what it sounds like. And I’ve certainly hit the wrong button. The very best fake apologies can evoke tremendous sympathy, which is part of their purpose… does that single moment in which someone failed outweigh the rest of their life? It took me a while to finally realize why it does.

Eventually I realized very one of these singular instances of poor judgment was preceded by a series of questionable decisions to set the stage, and so many points at which someone could have turned back before doing something heinous. I don’t think any of the fake public apologists saw a $100 bill on the sidewalk and instinctively reached down and picked it up before pausing to wonder who it belonged to. I do think of the swimmer who claimed drunken lust turned him into an amoral monster for only twenty minutes, after which transformed back into a real boy. (Maybe it was being dry too long.) Who we are when we sense an opportunity for to hurt somebody else is who we are the rest of the time, as Spacey proved: he kept being that person, taking advantage of any young actor he gained power over, for another thirty years until Rapp and others outed him.

The Gaslight

Fake apologies can minimize what happened, they can make it into a mistake anybody can make. They can confine the incident in the distant, hazy past. They can blame something trivial. But most insidiously they can move the entire incident out of the real world and back into the mind or minds of the accuser. The current popular term for this is gaslighting, but that’s most often used to invoke a man in a romantic relationship with a woman, undermining her and making her doubt her own experience. I don’t see it often applied to the public fake apologies that do the same thing.

The biggest, most recent one to me was Bob McNair of the Texans at an NFL owners meeting addressing the league’s current situation with players choosing to silently protest during the national anthem. To me all sports owners seem a little afraid of his players since they provide the product he’s selling and there is a real threat in some leagues that players will strike, damage the brand, or just quit and form their own league without billionaire owners and keep the money. In the current hullabaloo, the players are to a large degree controlling the protests and the conversation around them. They choose to kneel, to link arms, to support each other, and in one case whether they will as a team come out of the locker room. Protests are player affairs and ownership has sometimes decried it and sometimes joined in, and sometimes both, but ownership is clearly not sure how to respond. McNair’s curious choice of words to rally his fellow owners to deal with it head on was to say, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.”

These were the words he chose to describe a group of almost exclusively black men protesting institutional prejudice and violence against black men and women, specifically that they (including these players themselves) are treated with a presumption that they must be dangerous criminals who must at all times be contained and controlled by force. So a metaphor that makes them prisoners was not the most diplomatic choice of words. But according to McNair it’s okay because he didn’t actually choose those words or their meaning. That was all done for him, you see.

The phrase, in McNair’s explanation, was just an expression and a common one. It is often invoked to question the inversion of leadership to the detriment of an organization, which we’ve all heard used, or even used ourselves, in a workplace setting. And he’s almost right. The common expression is about the inmates running the “asylum”. The implication is people who are not able to create a functioning organization for themselves, in the metaphor the mentally unstable, should not be making the decisions. I’ve heard it used for my current job, about the need for supervisors to make decisions. McNair is the one who changed the common expression to include the word “prison”, as if it better fit the current organization.

I could give McNair some leeway for quoting an expression that has certainly changed over time: at one time it was the “lunatics” running the asylum, and removing the stigma around mental health means we probably will need a new version. Maybe they do say it differently where McNair’s from. We don’t always realize as they leave our mouths how certain words will resonate with our audience. If someone said “Pay peanuts, get monkeys” talking about hiring a workforce of NFL players that’s about 50% black, it would almost certainly have blown up as well, but tehre are a lot of expressions that don’t have racist roots that can resonate horribly. McNair did apologize for that choice of words that may have overshadowed and obscured his actual meaning. Had it ended there, I might have left it there as well. Unfortunately it didn’t.

As he went on to say, he was sorry anyone was offended, but it didn’t occur to him that anyone would take his words literally. The curious thing is now the offense that requires pardon has moved entirely into the mind of the audience. This is the case with all apologies in which anyone is “sorry anyone took offense”. The problem is not my speaking incorrectly, but instead entirely with you hearing incorrectly. The gaslighting happened when we were all supposed to know what McNair meant, but now we’re forcing him to take the time for all this public spectacle of apology. Somehow he’s the victim of this poor choice of words, being picked on by everyone out there who doesn’t understand the concept of figurative language. Somehow the apology became a question about the basic mental abilities of his audience, like everyone in the world but him was on the autism spectrum and couldn’t follow his highly developed figurative language.

I understand metaphorical language, but this one obscures as much as it illuminates. The players are in their current role not because they haven’t yet proved able to do anything else (they aren’t inmates), and management isn’t really doing them a service. They are present and able to publicly protest because they are more athletic and better at entertaining people through football than anyone else on the planet. They don’t aspire to move up the organizational chart where they’re currently trapped at the bottom, in fact they currently are the best at their profession. Nobody took him literally as having called the players prisoners, it just didn’t make any more sense or was any less dehumanizing than if he’d called them zoo animals. It wasn’t our fault for noticing.

Some of my hesitation to judge these people has come from a belief that we all might be tempted to do the wrong thing too. I think this because I do have some of the same underlying motivations go through my head as these guys clearly experience, in my case especially when it comes to women. But that’s giving human beings too little credit, and confusing imagination with actual temptation, and forgetting we all can have more than one thought at a time. I have friends and colleagues who sometimes light a spark in the darkest, horniest corners of my imagination, and it makes me think of an actress who said in a performance piece, “I want men to look at me and not just see sex.” Sometimes I do look at some other people in my life and I do see sex. I don’t think that will ever stop, and it made me wonder sometimes if that made me the same as a politician who boasts of his sexual power in “locker room talk”, but then also acts on it. Am I that much of a scumbag, just not bold enough to act on it? Would I someday issue a fake apology that explains that this is just what all men are like, so it wasn’t me, it was my biology?

No, because whatever those thoughts and feelings are, they will always exist in a head that contains many other thoughts, about our relationship, about where we are and what we’re there to do. And most importantly how nobody needs to talk about any of it with me. My capacity to be painfully aware of a friend’s truly amazing but totally irrelevant breasts is not actually my capacity to control the raging beast within, but the presence of other voices. This is my friend I never want to hurt, this is my friend I want to hear. So the only real difference between me and the truly scumbags, if there actually is one, would exist in the moment where I saw an unconscious naked woman. Whatever ghastly, inappropriate thoughts and feelings I’d have would simultaneously exist with a desire to call 911, to check her breathing, and cover her to keep her warm and prevent shock. We are most who we truly are when we actually have a choice: the proud pussy grabbers of this world choose mockery and groping. If I wouldn’t choose better, then I should be locked up too. If I ever find myself needing to explain and minimize what I did like these guys, then I shouldn’t be part of society either.

Halos

In the past few weeks I’ve thought about making some apologies of my own, to question whether I’ve been the other side of someone’s #meetoo story, but now I’ve decided not to. This has actually been a decision that’s been difficult to stick to, but I’ve been reading all the fake apologies and seeing the reactions to them and I realized something else. I don’t want to be one of the “good ones”. I don’t want to “get it”, I don’t want to be more woke than my peers. I do want to do better, but not by digging into my past and cleansing my regrets with honesty. I want to do better, but I don’t want a halo.

I think Spacey wanted one. His “while we’re on the topic” segue to explaining his own sexuality placed it in a context of a gay man exploring and discovering his own identity. Some of my friends have done that, a real exploration and painful coming out process, to themselves, to friends, to family and to a larger community, and they’ve done it through bathhouses and secrecy and one night stands and dating and sometimes eventually deciding they didn’t want all that and maybe didn’t even feel good about all of it, they just wanted one man to wear their ring. And sometimes found him. To a man, none has explained to me how they also needed power over vulnerable teenagers to do all this. What happened to Rapp and other young men wasn’t part of a well-documented journey that so many gay men have gone through.

I don’t want to apologize my way to an ally halo either. Louis C.K. has once again caused a lot of controversy with his own public apology. It avoids many of the hallmarks of fake apologies I feel like I keep discovering in that Louis is primarily just telling us it’s all true. All of it. He went a step further than I expected by explaining his understanding that even when he didn’t have institutional power as a writer and producer and star, he had the power of his reputation and status to push people into being afraid to express disgust directly to him or to talk about him publicly. Written by anybody else it would have been a good explanation of why Louis C.K. needed to go away. Coming from him, it still made people angry.

All public apologies have two purposes. First, there’s the actual admission of wrong doing and the attempt to make what amends can be made by prostrating oneself. This may be sincere, I don’t know what’s in people’s heads. But while a direct apology is asking those we wronged for forgiveness, a public apology is asking for forgiveness from the community. and it’s a direct apology to the victim. And so the second purpose is to begin the rehabilitation of one’s public life. I’m sorry for what I did, now I need to go away for a while and spend some time alone, but you can see, I’m not such a bad guy as everyone thought. When I come back, this is the taste I want to leave in your mouth. I think this is why so many public figures make a point of apologizing to their fans, for “letting them down”. It’s saying I know it’s hard to like me right now, but that was the old me. The new me will put out another album in a couple years like nothing happened.

This is why I stopped myself from talking about incidents that leave a bad taste in my mouth, about relationships that should have been different, and making that my public attempt to support everyone who is coming out now to talk about the ugliness of the world as they’ve experienced it. If I did it under my own name it would be more powerful, I’d be explaining how everything I keep going over is deep in my youth, how I never had power to leverage over another person, about wild environments, about how these aren’t stories of unilateral power and violence. Somewhere in my mind I’d be talking about wanting to change the world and not be a part of how it is and used to be. I’m not nor have I ever been a fully grown man who acts with the hormones of an impulsive teenager in a consequence free environment, like so many of these people. But every time I think about talking about where I wish I could have done better, I feel brave, I feel the halo coming down. People, especially women, would feel like they had to rush in to reassure me they know me and I’m not one of those guys. And there’s just no time for that. Nobody needs to spend their energy on forgiving and reassuring men right now. That’s why if I do write about anything I’ll leave my name off of it for now. Just words, just truth, no apologies. And no halos.