Editorial: Who's sorry now?
STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt B ~siness M ~ ager:...
...But as several recent attempts at apology demonstrate, just saying you're sorry does not seem to end the quarrel (see, Gordon Marino, "Apologize for Slavery...
...We aII learn sooner or later that, at some point in a quarrel it is better to resolve matters with an apology than to search for a settlement that will justly apportion blame...
...But he expressed it in Uganda, which was not part of that trade, rather than in West Africa, which was...
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...This playground etiquette has the virtue of simplicity...
...Illustrations: Cover, p. 13, Antonucci...
...p. 13, Joan Marcus...
...On the other hand, long-prepared institutional apologies may not achieve their ends either...
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...What evil was committed...
...Conflicts over the institutional transgressions of centuries past are not likely to fade before apologies that seem merely personal and serendipitous, as Mr...
...and the accurate placing of responsibility, if that is in question...
...And then there is the apology that has become a form of political grandstanding...
...Several other aspects of Clinton's ongoing problems are also clearer in the wake of the Wright decision...
...Rumors abound concerning what charges Starr may finally bring against Lewinsky or Clinton and others...
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...Attention must be paid to the possible consequences of an apology...
...Rather than making clumsy apologies, or foregoing them altogether, maybe we need to take a longer and fuller look at what apologies really require, especially when they involve historical and institutional transgressions or deep-seated public antagonisms...
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...Sorry, no...
...And how is the apology to be understood and formulated...
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...How did the now-contested practice come about, and how did it persist in the presence of ideas or beliefs to the contrary...
...Does an apology imply, as Catholic tradition has it, "a firm purpose of amendment...
...Second, the Jones decision throws a harsh light on the fouryear, and so far essentially fruitless, investigation of Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr...
...p. 16, from Abbey of Helmstedt...
...p. 31, Ray, Rothco...
...3, 17, Francois Duhamel...
...Financed and managed by right-wing groups whose transparent interest was in damaging Clinton politically, Jones sadly appears to have allowed herself to be as exploited by her advocates as she alleges she was by the then governor of Arkansas...
...What does it mean to apologize for things you didn't do yourself...
...In placing responsibility, wouldn't we have to understand why, for example, a people who had declared that all men are created equal, and fought a revolutionary war to uphold that belief, still allowed men and women to be bought and sold as chattel...
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...New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani apologized to the family of a Hasidic man, Yankel Rosenbaum, for his murder during the 1991 Crown Heights riots...
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...Clinton's did...
...But whatever Starr comes up with, the burden of proof should remain with him and with the Commonweal 6 April24, 1998...
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...At this juncture it is impossible to know how much truth, if any, there was in Jones's allegations concerning a vulgar sexual proposition...
...At this late date, Starr's foraging into Clinton's sex life seems desperate...
...The Vatican's "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," eleven years in the making, failed finally to come to terms with the responsibility of the Roman Catholic church, "as such," for the Holocaust...
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...STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Executive Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Production Editor: Tiina Aleman Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt B ~siness M ~ ager: Gregory Wilpert P~etry: Rosemary Deen Design: Emil Antonucci Screen: Richard Alleva Media: Frank McConnell Stage: Celia Wren Columnists: John Garvey, Abigail McCarthy, E.J...
...Is an apology, or demand for an apology, just another step in the construction of victim politics...
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...What these examples demonstrate is that apologies are more complicated than most of us imagine...
...Then, he was heatedly criticized for "attacking his own country in a foreign land" by Congressman Tom DeLay (R-Tex...
...Given the president's unique role in the American constitutional system, impeachment should remain the mechanism for holding a president accountable to the law...
...The spuriousness of Jones's case was long noted by commentators familiar with sexual harassment law and not necessarily sympathetic to Clinton...
...p. 26, Charlot...
...ay you're sorry...
...First, last year's Supreme Court ruling allowing Jones to bring suit against Clinton is an open invitation for politically motivated attacks against any sitting president...
...But one thing does seem clear...
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...But it is not wrong for all of us to consider how we might truly begin making amends for evils from which we benefit, though we did not commit them...
...9 Second, why and how do these travesties happen...
...Commonweal 5 April24, 1998 9 First, what are the facts...
...http://www.commonwealmagazine.org ~._-, 9 ~,-, i mm m m m m ,.v~v~' Who's sorry now...
...Then, there has to be a recognition and precise defining of the evil, if this is in doubt...
...The mayor managed to insult almost everyone else--mainly the family of the AfricanAmerican child, whose death in a car accident set off the riots...
...By whom...
...Are apologies then a bad idea...
...This apology ends in being an empty gesture...
...his methods chilling...
...cover art, Bill Mauldin, 9 1945 by Henry, Hok and Company, Inc...
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...failure to intervene in time to stop the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, he did not go on to admit that it is unlikely that the United States, or any other country, would act differently today...
...8, 24, Valerry...
...Though Giuliani apologized in the name of all New Yorkers, most will take their distance from an apology that seemed to grow from the mayor's politicized agenda rather than from any citywide effort to reflect on and repent the deaths of two innocent people...
...Congress, if it went to work on the nation's history of slave trading, would do any better than the Vatican or the Smithsonian have done...
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...Judge Wright, a Republican appointed by President George Bush, ruled that even if Jones's allegations were true, such behavior, however crude, did not constitute sexual harassment under Arkansas law...
...p. 7, Baloo, Rothco...
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...Much of the statement sounded defensive and even complacent, thereby making the apology seem merely bureaucratic, the work of an impersonal committee...
...And why...
...Serious historical study or serious fact-finding may be required...
...or, worse, it can become the cause of renewed quarreling...
...The decision, which implausibly argued that such suits would not be an undue distraction to presidents, should be reversed...
...THE WRIGHT DECISION In dismissing Paula Jones's sexual-harassment suit against President Bill Clinton before it went to trial, Judge Susan Webber Wright sounded a note of clarity amidst the din of accusations surrounding the president...
...Why did a people, who believed in equal protection under the law, insist that escaped slaves be returned to their owners...
...4, 19, 20, 25, Ross, Rothco...
...Moreover, Judge Wright's decision confirms the public's suspicion that, however morally flawed Clinton may be as a husband, the attempt to criminalize his private life is largely politically motivated...
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...In turning to the murky questions surrounding Clinton's sexual behavior, Starr has resorted to highly questionable tactics--including forcing the mother of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's alleged paramour, to testify under oath about her daughter as well as subpoenaing records of Lewinsky's book purchases--and further undermined his own credibility...
...For finally there is another task to be undertaken before an apology can be made...
...How many times as children did we hear that parental S admonition...
...Private civil suits should be postponed until the officeholder finishes his or her elected term...
...In these cases, it is not just that great evils were perpetrated, but they went on and on and on, in the face of beliefs, teachings, and ideals that held strongly to the contrary...
...It is not even easy to figure out how an apology should be constructed...
...President Clinton's apology in Rwanda did not seem to account for the problem of regretting hundreds of thousands of deaths while knowing that American policy still would not risk one American life to prevent such a slaughter...
...How could a church that taught and teaches that each of us is created in the image and likeness of God, for centuries treat the Jews with disdain, order their expulsion from Catholic countries, force their conversion, or sometimes torture and kill them as heretics...
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...3, 9,10, 28, 31, Baloo, Rothco...
...In fact, some of these efforts suggest that for many forms of transgression, saying sorry is inadequate or, incomplete...
...9 Third, what are the consequences of apologizing...
...It is not so easy to apologize...
...During his African tour, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for the complicity of the United States in the slave trade...
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...When the president expressed regret for U.S...
...What kind of intellectual and cultural dissonance was at work here...
...Moral claims on the part of current representatives of past victims should not be inflated but must be seen to be accurate and just...
...Initially appointed to determine whether the president was responsible for any Whitewater-related crimes, Starr recently has piggy-backed his efforts to the Jones case...
...In the United States, veterans' groups forced the closing of a 1995 Smithsonian Museum exhibition that raised questions about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...What would such a process involve...
...Extensive institutional analysis and critical self-examination may be needed...
...Those are some of the basic questions that need answering if there is to be true sorrow and true apology...
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...Institutional analysis may be particularly difficult: bureaucracies are not organized to examine themselves, and when they do, defensiveness of the kind demonstrated in the Vatican's statement on the Shoah may be the result...
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...p. 15, Christopher Little...
...In the absence of any plausible evidence linking Clinton to criminal acts, the American public rightly continues to give him the benefit of the doubt...
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...If so, it may end in sparking resentment and even dismissal of any wrongdoing...
...What does it mean to apologize for communities, movements, or institutions, especially for long-ago evils...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 8
