Very smart essay by Alexander Chee in Dame Magazine that seems somehow…RELEVANT right now. The first lines:

When I began writing this essay, I was thinking this might be about public apologies, for there had been many. “Mistakes were made,” as recent scandal star Chris Christie said, trotting out that fantastically passive blame-spreading non-apology.

Chee goes on to realize that as tempting as it is to leap into the fray of fury and mockery, the cycle of outrage about all the horrid, horrid people who need to be excoriated all over social media just keeps speeding up. Keeping track of and weighing in on all the fuckups is exhausting and soul-deadening.

“I have an outrage hangover,” he says.

It’s a wonderful essay. Go read the whole thing. I’ll wait.

We are grateful that a lot of people know SorryWatch has been wronged and have taken to Twitter to defend us. (I would say, charitably, that neither of us is an ace at Twitter. I just had to ask the social media guru at Tablet, my employer, how to retweet. Not a joke. I need to send that carrier pigeon to her house to thank her.)

When all this went down, Sumac was completely out of touch, doing that farshtunkiner noble bird rescue thing she does. Off the grid! For hours and hours! Getting bitten by fulmars! Me, I need to get away from the screens more, though I’m not so excited about being bitten by fulmars. I tend to personalize stuff, and sometimes it’s better to walk away and take deep breaths. That’s probably true for a lot of us. It’s always a choice whether to engage, and how.

fulmar, clearly feeling bitey

Chee:

Meanwhile, underneath the prevalence of the public apology is a great public wrong. And so we, the public, we want someone to do something. We want the offending column fixed, the black woman comedian hired, the bill to pass, banks to lend safely, clean drinking water, health care, a job, even just a book recommendation we can count on. We want action on whatever it is, and we go to Twitter for it, feed fatigue and all, because there, unlike just about everywhere else, we still get what we’re after.  Twitter, for all the ridiculousness there, is one of the few places where there’s accountability at all for any of this. While it may feel dangerous that no one is above being taken down by Twitter, it also means that in its way, it is the one truly democratic institution left. It may be terrifying that it is the one place you have to be more careful than most, but that is also why, for now, it still matters.

Without Twitter, the NYT would not pay attention to our situation. And we appreciate the support more than we can say. But we also don’t want to feed into a culture that just bleats and brays and snarks and then whirls like a ninja at the next idiot politician/venture capitalist/Stephen King.

SorryWatch staff at work

We get emails and FB requests (I’m more comfortable on FB than Twitter, because old) to tackle each new apology-demanding sin, each new offense. It’s so TEMPTING always to go after the Perkinses and the lunch-snatchers, the sinners du jour who get all the evanescent pixels. But we strive for a good balance on the site. We want to look at historical, literary and personal apologies as well as the Celebrity Dickweasel of the Day. Right now we are in reactive mode, but we want to do more than just react. We want to illustrate good apologies as much as (in our dream world, MORE THAN) bad ones. More than ever, we think we have an important role to play in encouraging and applauding apologies that aren’t all about strategy, perception and performance art.

We don’t want to be knee-jerk. (OK, we’ll still do it sometimes. It’s a lot of fun.) We don’t want to be cynical, even when we’re mad. And unlike most politicians and business weasels, we don’t want to come to apology from a “what can apology DO FOR ME” place.

While going through our posts tagged “mechanics of apology” for this post, I found an old one about this excellent public AND private apology, featuring a Pete Seeger song: Which Side Are You On? Like Chee’s essay, it seems relevant. (Wait, are we still mourning Pete Seeger, or have we gone on to the next thing?) It’s hard to do the real work of apologizing — if it were easy, more people would do it — and it’s hard to do the real work of changing our culture instead of just finger pointing.

Chee:

I’m not, it turns out, sick of outrage. I’m sick of what is outrageous. I wouldn’t want to change Twitter. I’d rather change America.