by CKR
Today Karl Rove is “it.” The Democrats are demanding an apology for his remarks about liberals and 9/11.
A few days ago it was Senator Dick Durbin, who obliged, twice. Before that it was Michael Jackson and the media who reported on his trial, and Bill Frist for his telediagnosis of Terri Schiavo.
Why the (manufactured) outrage, the necessity for humiliating the (supposed) offender?
It could be grasping the opportunity to score political points, to keep one’s political line in the news, to put the opposition on the defensive, to distract attention from other unfortunate events. It could also represent a genuine sense that someone has been wronged, but the frequency of these charges suggests that this is unlikely or that people have become extraordinarily sensitive.
But why does a demand for apology resonate enough with people to score political points? Let me advance an idea.
You don’t have to offer an apology if you’re innocent. Apologies are from the guilty to the innocent.
We Americans are constantly renewing our innocence. We lose it again and again. We don’t apologize for losing it. The emotion, rather, seems one of wistful regret for innocence long lost and then lost again and again.
A first sexual encounter is the stereotypical occasion of lost innocence, suggesting that innocence can be lost only once. Losing innocence also connotes gaining knowledge for better or worse, a sort of enlightenment, an “aha” moment that can only occur once.
Politically, the United States has lost its innocence again and again. The phrase has been used about the Civil War, World War I, the use of nuclear weapons in World War II, the necessity for spying and subversion in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. It’s renewable, you see, like surgery to restore a hymen, along with a little capsule of blood substitute.
So here we are, political virgins who can’t imagine that one political side might say something bad about the other. We have trivialized our political virginity from wars to words.
So we virgins can be outraged by the dreadful things that the other side says and demand an apology. It’s a comfortable feeling of self-righteousness.
But the other side of losing innocence is gaining knowledge. Something is lost as something else is gained. Perpetual innocence is perpetual ignorance.
I’ve just been reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman is British, and these books, suitable for children and adults, have been bestsellers in the UK and the US. They are compared to the Harry Potter series, but they are about something else: coming of age, the loss of innocence. Pullman captures the trepidations and anticipations of children who know that something will be lost and something will be gained and the difficulties of the adults who have to help them grow.
Pullman clearly thinks it’s better to grow up and leave ignorance behind. I’ll second that.