Just say "whoops"

When he objects to her feeding
the dog before serving his
dinner, she stabs him to death.

Lieutenant Calley, of infamous Mai Lai fame, has recently apologized for that terrible war crime of 40 years ago. This leads me once again to reflect on what seem to me to be useless words and phrases. Calley, who was convicted on some 22 counts of murder, and was responsible for the deaths of many innocent and defenseless people, has now apologized and said he was sorry. Of what conceivable use is this? Is this supposed to console whatever survivors there might have been? What is the point of the apology? It seems to me that saying you are sorry and/or you apologize simply does nothing useful and is therefore meaningless. Just the other day some dentist mistakenly pulled 12 or 16 of a woman’s perfectly good teeth. Do you think his saying he was sorry makes any difference to her? Fairly often someone’s home is mistakenly torn down, how does saying you’re sorry help? Several years ago I recall the Catholic Church announced they had decided to forgive the Jews as they did not murder Christ after all (I think this is what was said, or certainly something like this). Is it really helpful in any way to forgive something that happened (or perhaps didn’t happen) a couple of thousand years ago? I mean, like, what is the point? You might as well go out and bay at the moon. It’s as if people believe that no matter how horrific their behavior, saying they are sorry will make it better. I suppose you could argue that it makes the guilty person feel better but I wonder if even that is so. I guess maybe they get some satisfaction out of saying they are sorry as that is all they can do after committing some irreparable act, but even if genuinely felt and said that has to be a useless substitute for actions that are by then impossible to rectify. What if someone gets drunk and kills your wife and children in a car wreck? Does apologizing make anyone feel better? I suspect that in most cases the injured parties really don’t give a damn if the perpetrators are sorry or not, they say they are sorry whether they are really sorry or not because that is all that’s left to say. Sorry is not a magical word that can someone makes wrong things right.

“We can agree to disagree” is another basically nonsensical thing to say. I guess if you and a friend are having a drunken argument over whether Ursula Andress looks better in a bikini than Raquel Welch, and the argument rages until the wee hours of morning, it’s probably all right to agree to disagree. It was not a meaningful issue in the first place. Probably most arguments over whose team is the best, or whether hamburgers are better than hot dogs, or Budweiser is the finest beer, or if Sonny Liston took a dive, and such ordinary topics of conversation are of this meaningless variety. It is because they are intrinsically meaningless that people can say they agree to disagree. It just doesn’t matter. However, sometimes in even these types of arguments people become angry enough to murder or destroy lifetime relationships. It is when arguments are meaningful that it becomes impossible to agree to disagree. Do you think Congress is going to adjourn over health care reform, concluding they just agree to disagree? Should we all agree to disagree over torture as a matter of public policy? Some might say we agree to disagree over abortion, but do we really? Is that why abortion doctors are sometimes murdered? Can we agree to disagree over evolution versus creationism? This is impossible because it cedes credibility to positions that are just simply not credible. Agreeing to disagree is analogous to saying you’re sorry, both are just meaningless phrases that are somehow supposed to allow discourse to continue (however temporarily). We probably should invent a single word or phrase that combines all meaningless apologies and stalemates into one, then that could be universally understood, even cross culturally, to mean something like, “meaningless word agreed upon and understood to arbitrarily make us all feel better temporarily.” It would become a word like “okay,” that I believe is a pretty universally understood American word by now even in some of the remotest areas of the world.

Maybe something like “whoops” would suffice. So when you feel you should say sorry, just say whoops, or when you want to apologize, just say whoops. And when you arrive at the point when all you can conclude is that you agree to disagree, just say whoops. You know, like when you invade the wrong country you can just say whoops and everyone will understand. Actually, this word works for all kinds of things from farting and belching to executing an innocent person, dropping cluster bombs or accidentally killing people at wedding parties, or killing someone while torturing them. So remember, from now on, no matter what you do, no more apologies, false or otherwise, no more wimpy agreements to disagree, just say whoops instead. Like the word “okay,” whoops is easily identified as an American word, which is appropriate because Americans probably have much more use for such a word than most other people, but it could soon gain international acceptance as (1) an admission of guilt or confession of having done something really stupid, horrible, and offensive, (2) a symbolic statement of revealed and mutually acknowledged wrongdoing, (3) a signal that whatever it was is over, nothing can be done about it, and no further discussion or action is required, and (4) a statement to the effect that it is absolutely finished, so “don’t bug me about it any more.”

LKBIQ:
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P. G. Wodehouse

TILT:
No more than eight billiard balls could be made from a single elephant tusk.