...You're Gonna Be

Apologizing is an art form. I was married long enough to learn at least that. And how to make small-talk with foreign-born engineering nerds.* And how to take the things I feel and swallow them until they pack into a little plutonium nugget as dense as a moon, slowly flaying away the flesh of your stomach from the inside out. And how to make pancakes from scratch. The last one isn't really marriage-essential, more of a coincidence of timing. That plutonium-stomach thing just seemed like a bit of a dark note to end the paragraph on.

Celebrity non-apology apologies are of course the pyrite-standard for how not to address the needs of any of the parties involved, aggrieved or otherwise, with the possible exception of their publicist. The "I'm sorry if anyone was offended..." structure is already a weasel, basic switch-up language for "I'm sorry you feel incorrectly." Although to be fair, there are people who do feel incorrectly: the clinically depressed, autistics, anyone who is watching Two and a Half Men and Scientologists, just to name a lot.

With regular humans, it's safest to make the assumption that they don't buy the premise that Ashton Kutcher is a billionaire who moves in with a stranger at his suburban house and are therefore capable of rational thought. Apology is a question of tone (no comically elongated vowels, eyes always forward never up) and timing (quiet minute alone after the kids are in bed: yes. During the qualifying heats at the Stadium Supercross event she doesn't want to be at: less so).** My best success was always: shouted from another room during the regular catfight portion of whatever Real Housewives show she was watching. She would always say "Shutup shutup omygod you're making me miss this!" and I would say "I love you too."

Somehow that relationship was not forever.

There's been some genuine shock and even some praise for the current publicly offered apology by superbo gay-fixer organization Exodus International who are now very sorry for trying to cure boners with Jesus magic. I think because of their abrupt change of position*** there's a weird undercurrent of retroactive laissez-faire about the whole enterprise of ex-gay therapy that reads: well, it's a gross idea, but these were adults making an adult decision to choose to try this "therapy" to reconcile the pressures of faith and familial expecation with their overwhelming desire re-watch Magic Mike.**** To which I have to point out targeting people in extreme cases of emotional exhaustion and at their most vulnerable is a fairly extreme form of human exploitation, which is good news I guess if the people involved really do believe in hell. They've got the tone right with their apology, but the timing... maybe next time work it in before the psychological torture and the destruction of people's entire network of human relationships. I'm going to count this one as a miss.

On the other end is food-television personality and butter-fat pusher Paula Deen, who is in a world of trouble publicly because she's got what she considers to be a harmless case of horrible racism. Sure, sometimes she drops an n-bomb here and there, but only when funnin'. And she has a fantasy of staging a wedding for her brother that harkens back to a simpler time of a more ordered racial hierarchy and borders on ole-timey minstrelsy. Now, to her credit, this is something she only talked about and didn't actually do because she, unlike say a Scientologist, had the self-awareness to recognize that the media might notice and misconstrue her Old Confederacy/Jim Crow nostalgia for actual racism. So if she apologizes now, she's got the timing part right.

She has made a statement and the tone, eh... I'm not so sure. Her essential position is "Sorry I'm racist, but I'm an old white Southern person and we all kind of are." Well, except all the ones who aren't.

I realize that last point only carries any weight if there are some who aren't. I'm from California. There are some, right? Almost 800,000 people in Alabama voted for Obama in the last election. They couldn't have been all black people... could they?



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*Soccer. Or if they're not that into sports, jihad.

**Unless you are specifically apologizing about taking her to Stadium Supercross.

***Most likely ass-to-mouth

****Unless it's the lady-gays we're talking about, in which case slot in "finish weather-stripping the deck." They have way more practical stereotypes.