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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/opinion/28KELL.html?tntemail0

Who's Sorry Now?

By BILL KELLER

miss Trent Lott already. It's not just that he made such a swell chew toy for the Democrats. I was thoroughly enjoying the amazing crescendo of contrition, such a fitting end to a year in which there was so much worth apologizing for.

I loved watching Senator Lott clamber up the remorse curve, from clueless (If you're so thin-skinned that you found my innocent remarks insulting, I feel sorry for you) to defensive (I'm sorry I gave you the erroneous impression that I'm a racist) to abject (I am one sorry bigot). I loved the way he went on what he probably thinks of as the television network all the black folks watch, and declared he would make up for his sinful past.

I wish he'd been allowed to stay around long enough to show us what exactly that would entail. Cutting a record of Kwanzaa songs? Adopting an African child? Most likely, Mr. Lott being Mr. Lott, his restitution would consist of funneling a few hundred million dollars to the Pascagoula shipyard to build a superfluous destroyer and name it in honor of Martin Luther King.

Then, when political absolution did not come his way, there was the bitter backslide: They came after me because I'm a Christian. Who did? The Jews? The secular humanists? Infidels in general? If he were still the Republican leader, would he be flexing for another round of apologies? Truly, Trent Lott is the Sisyphus of Sorry.

Before his apparent relapse, though, Senator Lott was on to something. He had entered into a stage of contrition that few American politicians ever reach — active penitence. If Mr. Lott's remorse is suspect and easily mocked, his willingness to go beyond the usual peremptory expression of "regret" all the way to a promise of reform is still quite extraordinary. The last American politician I can think of who set off on a course of restitution was John McCain, who, after being tainted by the Keating Five influence scandal, dedicated himself to reducing the corrupting impact of campaign money.

We are in some respects a people that puts a premium on redress of grievances. Our legal system features punitive damages and community service. Our 12-step programs demand that we set things right with everyone we have injured. But in public life, we often settle for a whiff of regret.

What is it about us? Perhaps as citizens of a frontier nation, we are inherently believers in the fresh start. Judith Martin, the Washington Post writer who dispenses wisdom about American mores under the Miss Manners brand, speculates that our quickness to forgive derives from popular psychology, with its emphasis on the therapeutic value of confessing your weakness. "I think," she says, "it has to do with the extremely nice, compassionate but unworkable idea that everyone should always be handed a clean slate, and if you apologize everything should be erased. I'm the one who should be defending that — etiquette as a useful device for defusing conflict. But carried too far it destroys the whole idea that you have a reputation."

A few nations have developed accountability to the point of a fetish. Japanese political and business leaders ritually grovel and resign if their behavior causes harm. In April the entire Dutch government stepped down in atonement after an official report blamed Dutch peacekeepers for failing to prevent the massacre of 7,000 people at Srebrenica in 1995. In this, the Dutch took a hit for all the other nations, including our own, that individually and collectively put the peacekeepers in an untenable position and averted their eyes to the impending catastrophe.

Try to imagine an American president saying, as the Dutch prime minister did, that it was "unavoidable and necessary that political consequences are attached to the accumulation of international and national shortcomings." American officials are occasionally forced out when things go wrong (or, more often, look bad) but when was the last time an American official resigned out of honest shame?

In contrast to the Dutch, we have refined the art of the apologetic-sounding non-apology to near perfection. I'm sorry if I've offended you. Public admissions of wrongdoing are usually extracted drop by drop. Bill Clinton denied his Oval Office affair ("which is what a gentleman in that situation is supposed to do," Miss Manners reminds me) until the dogs of impeachment were nipping at his heels; then he began to exude remorse like flop-sweat. Ted Kennedy never did utter what an ordinary person would regard as an apology for his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. He voiced his grief and regrets and then declined to discuss the subject evermore. (This worked with Massachusetts voters, but effectively disqualified him from running for president, an unintended comeuppance.)

The American preference for what H. R. Haldeman called the "limited hangout" probably reflects the fact that confession carries consequences, liability, exposure. Corporate legal departments are surely the main obstacle to penitence in the business world. In Japan, when an airplane crashes the president of the company goes personally to abase himself before the relatives of the victims. In America, expressions of remorse are usually saved for the unlikely event of a sentencing hearing. Until then we get weasel words that may be mistaken for an apology without actually owning up to anything actionable. Googling in search of an apology from the former Enron C.E.O. Kenneth Lay, I came up with a report in the newsletter Oil Daily headlined "Lay apologizes." But tell me if you can find any remorse in his actual words: "In hindsight, we made some very bad investments in some non-core businesses."

I grew up in a church that more or less literally invented the mea culpa. Confession was followed by a good act of contrition, but that was not the end of it. The cleaning of the slate was not complete without penance, however symbolic. Sin not expiated was supposed to have consequences, the details of which the nuns could conjure up with shiver-inducing rumbles of anathema and eternal hellfire.

But the church, too, these days seems to have traded anathema for the limited hangout. Cardinal Bernard Law, after months of Clintonian hair-splitting, finally accepted his responsibility for endangering the children of Boston in a statement that was unevasively contrite. But you will search the statements of the pope in vain if you seek contrition for the church's systemic failure to protect its children from predatory priests. "Solidarity and concern" was what he offered the victims in April. "Sadness and shame" for the actions of "some priests" was as far as he had advanced by July, his last word on the subject. Sorry, but the spirit of Mr. Haldeman still resides in the Vatican.

Americans are inordinately forgiving, but they do want that plausible noise of contrition. Can anyone doubt that Pete Rose would be back in baseball if he had admitted his gambling and thrown himself on the public mercy? Miss Manners wonders if even Mr. Lott might have survived if he had been a little shrewder in his first response: "I admit I was telling a white lie when I said the country would be better off if Strom Thurmond's segregationists had won the presidency. I was just trying to make an old man happy on his birthday."

  
Imagine if the idea of meaningful contrition caught on in our public life. You would want a balance. You can't have everyone falling on his sword for the least offense, or we'd quickly run out of risk-takers, entrepreneurs, leaders with any gumption. Imagine, though, if the default response to a public figure's expression of remorse was not automatic absolution but "How do you intend to make up for it?"

I've been thinking we might start, for the sake of symmetry, with Senator Bill Frist, Mr. Lott's successor as Republican leader. A review of his record offers some possibilities, should he choose to get off on the contrite foot. The oddest blot was probably his practice, while a medical student, of adopting cats from animal shelters to be killed during research experiments. (There goes the PETA vote.) But that is an ancient sin, one he himself confessed as "heinous," and surely scrubbed away by his yearly travels to Africa to work as a medical missionary.

Here's an item of more immediate interest. In the twilight of the Congressional session, some legislator anonymously arranged for a provision to be slipped into the Homeland Security bill protecting vaccine makers (mainly Eli Lilly) from lawsuits filed by the parents of autistic children. Hundreds of parents are pressing a claim that the mercury in a measles vaccine contributed to their children's disorder. For all I know, the suit may be baseless, but surely that's for a court to decide. This is a glaring example of legislative malfeasance. And strong evidence points to Dr. Frist as its author. He is cozy with Lilly and he drafted identical legislative language earlier. But he refuses to own up to it.

Penance, anyone?

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