On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > But the public apology Baldwin made is part of public ritual and > sincerity is not as important. It's more akin to being asked, "How are > you doing?" and responding with the public ritual of, "I'm doing well" > rather than taking the questioner at his word and giving a long > description of everything that is going on.
I suspect he will strongly protest, but I think this has more to do with Kevin's anti-Baldwin bias than any coherent principle. Baldwin made an off-hand joke about a Filipino mail-order brides. That may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people. My wife is Filipino, and I have talked to many of her relatives in the PI, and the underlying issue is not funny at all. Does anyone who knows anything about Baldwin at all really think that he was making light of a serious human tragedy? Of course not. But would any halfway decent person who has it brought to their attention that they have just made people who suffer from an inhuman level of exploitation and abuse feel trivialized begrudge a simple apology (celebrity or not)? I really doubt it. Does Kevin really want to defend a principle that one never apologizes to anyone who is hurt unintentionally by something one says or does? The paradigm of this for me was early in my history online. In making a longish argument about US exploitation I wrote something like "American rape of the environment". A woman on that list wrote back deeply offended, reporting that she herself was a rape victim and my use of the word rape in that context was deeply offensive and trivializing of her experience. In her view the word rape should only be used in its literal sense.. I disagreed with her then and now about that last assertion, and of course in no way do I trivialize or take lightly the experience of rape, and I have worked with many rape victims over my career. But it was a very simple thing for me to write an apology to her on the list, explaining that I took rape seriously, empathized with her suffering, and that as long as I or she were on that list I would make an honest effort to not use the word rape in that way. That was a sincere apology, I meant it exactly as I wrote it, she was satisfied, and we went on to have a long history of fruitful and productive and mostly friendly arguments on a variety of topics. I don't see much difference between this and what happened with Baldwin. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... Smart (TV) People on Ice! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
