When to say we’re sorry. America in red and blue. A D-Day commando and his great-grandson. And more.
A headline caught my eye: “‘Never apologize’: How Moms for Liberty teaches its members to spin the media.” Apologies are an interesting issue. Traditionally, parents have required their children to apologize, when those young’uns have done wrong. “Apologize to your brother!” That sort of thing. This has been considered part of moral living.
I have quoted a headline. The article underneath it began,
Last week, a local Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty attracted attention for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter. After the local paper reported the story, the group added additional “context” but kept the quote. Eventually, after it faced even more scrutiny, the organization removed the quote and apologized in a statement posted to its Facebook group.
That, however, was a big mistake, according to advice at the Moms for Liberty national conference’s media training session Friday.
“Never apologize. Ever,” said Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “This is my view. Other people have different views on this. I think apologizing makes you weak.”
I can see it the other way: Refusing to apologize, when you have something to apologize for, makes you weak.
Barry Goldwater titled his memoirs “With No Apology.” That goes with his pugnacious character. But Goldwater did apologize, when he thought it was necessary. In 1984, he took to the Senate floor to apologize for having misled his fellow senators. He himself, he said, had been misled by the Reagan administration (on a matter concerning Nicaragua).
(He also wrote a “scorching” letter to the CIA director, William J. Casey, as a headline in the Washington Post noted. To revisit this long-ago issue, go here.)
You are familiar with the expression “Never complain, never explain.” It applies to various instances of life. But not to others. There are times to complain and times to explain. We have all done both, surely (and rightly).
Maybe the word “never” should be avoided. “Never apologize. Ever,” said the Florida Republican chief. “Never complain, never explain.”
Never say never?
Al Sharpton has stubbornly refused to apologize for the Tawana Brawley hoax. He said that Jesse Jackson had made a big mistake when he apologized for referring to New York City as “Hymietown.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump had some advice for Howie Carr, the Boston columnist and radio host. Carr had mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren with a war whoop. (At the time, the senator was identifying herself as Cherokee.) According to Carr, Trump told him, “Whatever you do, don’t apologize. You never hear me apologize, do you? That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek, way back. Remember? He was doing okay till he said he was sorry.”
Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was a sports commentator who was fired by CBS after making a remark about black athletes. He said that they were better than white athletes because they had been “bred” that way in slavery.
Let’s return to the state of Florida and its GOP. Governor Ron DeSantis has a “super PAC” called “Never Back Down.” (There’s that word again, “never.”) This comports with a macho image. But I can think of at least two instances in which DeSantis has backed down, dramatically.
He used to take a firm line on Russian aggression in Ukraine. He knocked President Obama as too soft on this issue. Also, he took a firm line on the federal debt and budget deficit, saying that entitlement reform was a necessity.
Then came populism and its pressures . . .
“To every thing there is a season”: apologize, not apologize; back down, not back down. Moral sense ought to guide a person. Something occurs to me: A book on apologies — apologies in history (and non-apologies); the moral ins and outs — is a good idea.
• You may have heard of the “Big Sort.” The idea is that Americans are sorting themselves by political preference. Red lives with red, blue lives with blue — and never the twain shall meet? Nicholas Riccardi, of the Associated Press, has done an interesting report on this problem (if it is a problem) — a commendably balanced one: here. Says he, “Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.”
I am a political animal, all too. But sometimes politics in our country just has too much control — too much control over minds, hearts, lives. For many, it is a substitute religion.
In 2020, David French published an excellent book called “Divided We Fall.” He was originally going to title it “The Great American Divorce.” I reviewed it here. Our salvation, said David, will be pluralism.
And related to pluralism, I wrote, “is federalism: Let California be California, Texas be Texas; let Oregon be Oregon, South Carolina be South Carolina — with this caveat: The fundamental rights of every citizen must be protected.”
Yes. Still — I think there is something sad about political segregation. I know that others will know what I mean, even if we regard segregation as a lot better than combustion.
• Senator Rick Scott put out a message that received a lot of attention:
I’m warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida. They are not welcome in the Sunshine State.pic.twitter.com/ZB4RVz6XdK
— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) June 27, 2023
About this, many points could be made, and I will make two of them:
The senator’s list is pretty limited. What about fascists, Holocaust-deniers, Klansmen?
Also, some of the greatest anti-Communists have been socialists, at least democratic ones. Discussing this issue on Twitter, Bill Kristol mentioned George Orwell and Sidney Hook. Yes. Indeed, I doubt there was ever a more valuable anti-Communist than Orwell. Those two novels of his — you know which two — rocked the world, and are still rocking it.
(I wrote about Animal Farm and its enduring influence in a column last May, here.)
If you have not read Sidney Hook’s autobiography, Out of Step, I recommend it. It came out when I was in grad school (mid 1980s) and it made an impression on me.
Also, Hook was one of Abigail Thernstrom’s favorite teachers. (The others, she told me, were Louis Hartz and Robert McCloskey.)
In 1985, Ronald Reagan awarded Hook the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I further think of labor leaders: George Meany, Lane Kirkland. I think of Western European leaders in the Cold War: Attlee and Wilson in Britain; Mitterrand in France; Schmidt in West Germany; Craxi in Italy.
Anyway . . .
• President Biden has nominated Elliott Abrams to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. This has caused a stink, as you can see in this CNN report. I am very pleased — not about the stink but about the nomination. As I have written many times, I have admired Elliott since I was in college, and he was a whippersnapper, too — an assistant secretary of state under Reagan.
• Another man I have admired since I was in college: Bernhard Langer, the golfer. He won the Masters in 1985. And again in 1993. He has just won the U.S. Senior Open. He is 65. (You qualify for the senior tour when you turn 50.) He has won more tournaments on the senior tour — 46 — than anyone else has.
A hoss, Bernhard Langer is. Frankly, he looks the same as he always has, pretty much: all that hair, and super-fit. In an interview, he said, “I have my mother that’s going to be 100 on August 4th, so I think I have good genes. Hopefully, I’ll be around a few more years.”
He’ll be “shooting his age” forever, won’t he?
• Maybe we could do a language item. The other day, I mistyped “laureate.” I typed, instead, “laurate.” I saw this. I also saw that spell-check was not flagging it. Was there something wrong with my spell-check? Another possibility occurred to me: Maybe “laurate” is a word that I don’t know?
Yes, it is, or was. Laurate: “a salt or ester of lauric acid.”
That’s an interesting way to learn a new word: Mistype a word you know, and if spell-check says kosher . . .
• “Léon Gautier, Last Surviving French Commando From D-Day, Dies at 100.” For that obit, go here.
Contemplate this horrifying fact: “Of the 177 who had waded ashore, just two dozen escaped death or injury.”
Contemplate this happy one: “Mr. Gautier is survived by many descendants, including a great-great-grandson who was born on June 6, 2017 — exactly 73 years after D-Day.
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