Forced Public Apologies

Among the many failures of communication, one of the things that has driven me absolutely insane over the past 10 years is the concept of the “forced apology.” You see it all the time; two of the more prominent ones included supposed “racial insensitivity” like Michael Richards aka Kramer from ‘Seinfeld,” and most recently, Paula Deen, who was apparently a cook or something on TV. Paula Deen was fired for supposedly saying a racial epithet 20 or however many years ago…. just think about that for a second. Forget rap music, forget what you hear every day from famous people, and let’s attack a woman who told the truth about saying something offensive, in an unknown context, in the past some time. The sad part is that people don’t care about the truth, and they prefer people to be wormy and lie about things, even though they themselves say offensive things. But, when that offensive thing is racist, then whoa! Stop the presses! Apparently racism is the worst thing in the world; a person’s immature, stupid beliefs have no effect on you or anybody else, whether racist or sexist, it doesn’t matter. Yet we treat it as if it’s murder or rape. As I’ve stated, criticize that person; fine. But unless that belief is directly reflected in their job and actions, then leave it alone. A woman cooking food on TV has nothing to do with her saying an offensive term at some point in the past, especially when you don’t even know the context.

Now I’m going to take a very unpopular stance, which I’ve gotten attacked for before; I supported when Michael Richards (Kramer) said racial remarks to a black heckler in his comedy audience. People called him racist, this and that, when he certainly wasn’t; he was simply trying to offend somebody, and he knew that would piss the guy off, since the guy had interrupted his show and was ruining it for the audience like a rude jerk. When you’re insulting some jerk, especially if you’re a comedian, the LAST thing you think about is “oh am I going to offend somebody else?” No, you’re thinking about hurting that person’s feelings by any means necessary, not making some vague social commentary, and it’s childish for people to have asserted that he was making some big racist-ideological remark, when he was just trying to piss the guy off; whatever someone says to insult another has nothing to do with anybody else. No social commentary, no ideological concept, nothing. An insult is primarily meaningless outside of context; for example, “bitch” means female dog, but when somebody calls another that word, I’m 100% positive they don’t mean “female dog.” Same goes for any other insult; “fuck you.” What the hell does that even mean? There’s no definitive answer for what that actually means, but you know it’s meant to insult them. Personally, you could call me any stupid curse word, but what would most insult me is somebody relating an actual concept about me which makes me feel poorly about myself; to insinuate I’m stupid or unworthy of respect, things like that would truly offend me because those are things that I take pride in not being. Some formless word with no actual contextual definition means NOTHING to me, whether it has racial overtones or not.

And this leads me to the forced apology, one of the fakest, most meaningless things that people love. People who love to be phony-outraged over something equally love seeing a person not stand up for themselves and become reduced to groveling at their feet. It’s not a sincere apology; it’s not somebody saying something and then thinking “hmm I shouldn’t have said that because it was inappropriate and disrespectful.” No, it’s somebody saying something, people becoming either truly offended or fake offended when it doesn’t even affect them, and then saying “if you don’t say these magic words and submit to our will, we will try to ruin your life.” Depending on the power and numbers wielded by the demander, they will say those meaningless words or not, and most of the time they do. The thing is, people who stand by what they say are the ones who actually typically end up coming out looking better. I’ve seen numerous examples of people who say something that isn’t politically correct, a bunch of people whine about it despite not even being involved, and the person basically tells them to screw off, because their fans and friends know who they really are and what they’re truly about and they don’t need the approval of others who have nothing to do with them. 

Personally, I think it’s more immature to whine about something another person simply says and try to demand that they grovel at your feet, rather than actually being a person who said something insensitive and stood by what they said. Enough with the forced apologies from people who don’t really mean it. I disagreed with Martin Bashir recently when he attacked Palin for using the word “slavery” in a figurative sense and tried to immaturely relate it to actual slavery, thus prompting him to talk about a slave journal about one who was defecated on (yeah it’s disgusting) and then said that maybe Palin should have been that slave in that position. Insensitive for him to say that? Sure, I completely thought it was a stupid thing to say, not because it was offensive, but because it made no sense. But he shouldn’t have been forced to apologize for­ what he said, because it was appropriate in the context he did. People need to remember that somebody doesn’t offend you; you become offended by doing it to yourself. We’re all adults and need to start acting like them, rather than whining and forcing apologies from people.­­­­­_­