Perhaps you’ve heard of the furore surrounding comments by a rapper about the military. I hadn’t, and I don’t care what most useless art-ticks think. I was somewhat impressed, however, with the attempted apology from this guy “Soulja Boy”, in that it sounded mostly sincere. Oh, he gets in his Bush-bashing and his mistaken notions about poverty or unemployment being caused by defense spending (I thought federal spending created — oh nevermind). But for all his misjudgements and subsequent bad advice in rough rhyme, he does seem to genuinely regret at least part of this unhappy episode, and not just the catching some serious death stares from the military part.
At one point he rapped “f*** the troops” in a song or something (how the Hell would I know?), and has been roasted for it. His apology is clumsy and incomplete, while festooned with a bunch of weak exculpatory explanation, which boils down to four different ways of blaming Bush for this and that. He does not know what a proper apology is, that it contains three parts and no excuses, and he even blunts his own apology by tacking a petty re-direct at the end:
I am just frustrated that we haven’t been able to bring you all home quick enough and my frustration got the best of me. I am deeply sorry.
–from Fox News
But it seems to be a misunderstanding of what makes the troops tick, not malice. He perhaps can’t help but think that that sort of tone is what will really strike a chord in the heart of a soldier, but then I expect him to have a cartoonishly malformed image of what an American serviceman is all about. So I wind up far more inclined to accept his apology (let me just slip back into a military setting for a moment) as a flawed but genuine offering.
By the way, an apology consists of a statement admitting error, an act of contrition, and a commitment not to repeat the error. Entreaties for forgiveness are separate, and excuses are not allowed. Further discussion may be pursued, but the apology itself must not be conditional.
