Michael Moynihan has a good piece up about the ritual of the apology and our culture's inherent absurdity:
As best I can tell, everyone on the Internet is upset, their tender feelings inflamed by insensitive jokes, panting with exhaustion from the endless search for new outrages, demanding that people they don’t know offer them abject apologies for saying things they don’t like. This, it seems, is why the Internet exists—to remind us that different people who think different things are funny, that some people think nothing is funny, and others who get a perverse joy in watching well-known people, fearful their bank accounts will deflate, prostrate themselves before the public, expressing "disappointment" in their true selves.
So how does one achieve forgiveness from the permanently offended? Well, in the most extreme situations, there is always the shame-faced march to rehab ("It was the booze that inspired my Wagnarian fits of anti-Semitism, because such profanities don’t exist in my heart"). There is, however, a much cheaper option: the ritualistic public apology. As public pressure mounts on the offender, threatening to damage their own "brand" or a company’s earnings, a carefully crafted apology is released into the wild, America’s wounds are salved, and the braying mob moves on to its next victim. Nothing has changed, of course, but nothing was meant to have changed. Ours is an age of moral grandstanding—in 140 characters.
Moynihan was writing about the Onion—which was recently forced to grovel in front of the masses for a tweet that some deemed to be the worstest thing in the whole wide world!—but by yesterday the Media Offense Complex had found a new target: Bloomberg Businessweek, which published this cover:
Now, I'm as skeptical as anyone I know when it comes to charges of racism ... but even I was given pause by that horror show. Businessweek, of course, was driven to its knees and made to apologize. But, as it turns out, it's not quite as horrific as you might think:
To go with the story they commissioned an illustration from a Peruvian illustrator who, in a missive that Businessweek shared with me, explains "I simply drew the family like that because those are the kind of families I know. I am Latino and grew up around plenty of mixed families."
That quote was given to Matt Yglesias, who kind of blew the whole thing up (at least in my corner of the Twittersphere). The lesson, as always? Instead of scrambling around to find the latest OFFENSIVE HORRIBLE OUTRAGE that we must pry apologies from, take a break. Step back. Breathe. Sometimes things aren't quite as bad as you think.