The Sorry State Of Affairs

PUBLIC APOLOGIES ARE AS OLD AS ODYSSEUS. THEY’RE JUST MORE COMMON—AND ANNOYING—THAN EVER.

- Daniel Mendelsohn

Roseanne is very, very sorry. Or is she? Hard to tell, in this era of a weary­ingly familiar one­two punch: public offensiveness followed by tearful—and often none too persuasive—public remorse.

It’s been going on for a while, but things have accelerated since the internet and social media have made it possible not only for all kinds of misbehavior to become instantly public (take the video of New York lawyer Aaron Schlossberg going ballistic in a deli after hearing the employees speaking Spanish in May) but for public figures to tweak, massage, and attempt to recast their problematic utterances.

MSNBC host Joy Reid has been apologizing pretty much nonstop since last December, when offensive posts she made on her blog were brought to light (“I’m a better person now than I was over 10 years ago”). In June, after she used an unprintable epithet to refer to Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee made an on­air statement of apology in which she suggested that she has been “hoping to reclaim” the four­letter word in question for women.

And then there’s Roseanne, who lost her recently rebooted eponymous TV show last spring after tweeting that Valerie Jar­rett, a former aide to President Barack Obama, looked like the love child of the Muslim Broth­erhood and Planet of the Apes. Needless to say, Roseanne has been tearfully saying she’s sorry ever since.

All this makes you wonder: Just what is an apology—and are there any sincere ones anymore?