The unforgettable moment at this year’s Oscars was delivered by Will Smith, once Hollywood’s most highly-paid star, who stepped onstage and slapped host Chris Rock after the comedian made a joke at the expense of Smith’s wife Jada. So cynical have we all become about the media and publicity stunts, there were some who thought it might have been a set-up, like the Ricki Gervais-Steve Carrell feud at the Golden Globes. This seems unlikely, given the risk-reward calculus. Smith apologized a few days later, via Instagram. He said his behavior was "unacceptable and inexcusable.” Explaining that the reason for his over-reaction was that Rock’s joke touched on his wife Jada’s alopecia (hair loss), Smith admitted that “I was out of line and I was wrong,” and that "Violence in all forms is poisonous and destructive." All in all, it was a classy apology, and what made it all the more unusual was that he actually had something to apologise for; not just poor personal conduct that reflected badly on the film industry, but physical assault, which in other contexts leads to criminal charges.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a series of apologies from famous people that are far less warranted than Smith’s but far more groveling. As we have seen a gradual imposition of speech codes across American academic, government, and corporate life by the authoritarian Left and the media that carries its water, artists, academics, and even low-level workers have learned to be extremely careful about what they say. The paranoid climate has chilled speech so that the vast majority stays silent in the face of obvious lies. Those that do step over the invisible line often retract, retreat, and issue grovelling apologies in the hopes of appeasing the monster, but this is a sucker’s game: Apologies, no matter how abased, never appease the mob, and they lose you the respect of friends.
After comedian and actor Patton Oswalt posted a photo with Dave Chappelle on Instagram while they were both doing shows in Seattle, the outrage of online trans activists caused Oswalt to issue a cringing plea for forgiveness for the sin of being friends with a fellow comedian who doesn’t totally share all of his opinions. “I’ll always disagree with where [Chapelle] stands NOW on transgender issues,” he followed up in another post - “gonna keep trying.” Instead of standing by his friend, Oswalt attempted to throw the metaphorical woke crocodile an arm, hoping it wouldn’t eat the rest of his career.
In his honor, I created the Oswalt Scale of groveling apology, which like a Spinal Tap amp, goes up to 11 and is written as O®. Social media is the retail venue for apologies at the lower end of the Scale. I’ll give 1 (one) O® to the “Twitch streamer” called AndiVMG who tweeted that “her pronouns” were “bad/af” [bad as fuck], but when the “neopronoun” community of narcissistic solipsists took her to task for being “transphobic” and for “invalidation of their identities,” issued this apology on Twitter: “It wasn’t meant to mock people who use neopronouns. However I have since educated myself on the matter and spoken to people who use neopronouns and I see why what I said was hurtful.”
Also on Twitter, a doctor named Samir S. Shah used the word "tribalism" to refer to silos in medicine in an article he wrote. Apparently, “Despite good intentions & a diverse team, we did not initially recognize how the term "tribalism" to refer factionalism might be problematic,” and “in using the term “tribe” to describe members of medical communities, we ignored the complex & dynamic identities of Native American, African, & other Indigenous Peoples & the history of their oppression.” This is standard-issue progressive professional penitence, and it weighs in at a mere 2 O®s.
A 3 O®-grade example comes from pre-Covid Hollywood. Way back in 2018, Matt Damon dared to say that “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation … right? Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?” Uh, wrong. Alyssa Milano, who claims to have “been a victim of each component [that Damon mentioned above] of the sexual assault spectrum,” opined that “they are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalised, accepted – even welcomed – misogyny.” Damon is a smart guy. He went to Harvard. He knew what he had to do: Hit the Today Show and say “I really wish I’d listened a lot more before I weighed in on this … I don’t want to further anybody’s pain with anything that I do or say. So for that I’m really sorry.” He concluded by wisely getting out of the way of the woke torpedo, adding: “I should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while.”
Former curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gary Garrels once dared to suggest that entirely avoiding the work of white men would amount to “reverse discrimination,” and said that the museum “will continue to collect white men. There are a lot of great women artists, but there are also still a lot of good men out there working as well.” Outraged former employees of SFMOMA called for Garrels to resign, citing his “toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity.” Under his leadership, it should be noted, SFOMA had sold a Mark Rothko painting and used the $50 million proceeds to buy over 100 artworks by “female artists, artists of color and self-identifying LGBTQ+ artists.” It’s never enough. Garrels “deeply and personally apologize[d] to all of you for any hurt I may have caused” and then resigned. Score: 4 O®.
Earning 5O,® Atlanta restaurant Le Bilboquet issued two, successively more pandering apologies for enforcing its dress code against a former basketball player. “We sincerely apologize to Dominique Wilkins…” they said. “No patron of our restaurants should be made to feel unwelcome or less than, and for that we are deeply sorry.” Wilkins had accused them of racism, though describing his attire on the day as “a nice pair of casual pants on with a stripe, I had a very nice, red shirt and I had sneakers on” – i.e. not in line with the restaurant’s dress code. Earning a 6 O® in the food category is Webber Grills, which allegedly apologized to customers for sending a recipe for meatloaf shortly before the expiry of Marvin Aday, the singer known as Meatloaf.
James Corden, host of the Late Late Show, hit 7 Oswalts when he apologized for his "Spill Your Guts" segment, in which celebrities sometimes eat foods not eaten by most Americans, after a few Asian critics complained their food was being featured. “We don't want to make a show that will upset anybody," said Corden, promising to cancel the bit. He went further - “It's not for us to determine [why] somebody's upset or hurt about something. That's not for us to decide.” Imagine George Carlin, or even Milton Berle, saying that.
An 8 O® apology comes from astronaut Scott Kelly, twin of Senator Mark Kelly, who once tweeted that Winston Churchill was “one of the greatest leaders of modern times,” a statement uncontroversial for nearly 70 years. The uninformed responses on Twitter don’t dignify covering at any length (one example: “Winston Churchill is just as good as Hitler.”) What is worth noting, however, was Kelly’s abject, Gollum-esque back-down: “My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support.” Educating himself sounds like a good idea. Churchill certainly held views on race, empire, and other subjects which were completely typical for someone born into the ruling British class in the year 1876. He made some controversial, and many arguably wrong, decisions in his long career as a soldier, politician, and wartime leader, but they are hardly reasons to write off Britain’s greatest modern Prime Minister.
Nearing the top of the Oswalt Scale, we have actress Ellie Kemper retroactively apologising for going to a dance as a teenager. "The century-old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist and elitist past. I was not aware of the history at the time, but ignorance is no excuse. I was old enough to have educated myself before getting involved. I unequivocally deplore, denounce, and reject white supremacy," she said. Just in case that didn’t cover it, Kemper added that “I acknowledge that because of my race and my privilege, I am the beneficiary of a system that has dispensed unequal justice and unequal rewards." That additional touch earns her a rare 9 O® and her own TV show.
You might think people who sell books would stand for free speech and support the offering of a variety of opinions, but you’d be wrong. Last July, the American Booksellers Association sent a collection of book samples to members, including Irreversible Damageby Abigail Shrier. In response to complaints from trans activists, the ABA immediately apologized, calling this circumspect and well-researched work “an anti-trans book” and vaunting that merely sending a sample for booksellers to read was “a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s ends policies [sic], values, and everything we believe and support. It is inexcusable. We apologize to our trans members and to the trans community for this terrible incident and the pain we caused them.” You would have thought from this that the book was mailed with a special insert by Ted Kaczynski, instead of just undermining gender ideology myths. This kind of truly unhinged apology is the minimum requirement for a 10 O® score.
The top of the Oswalt Scale is easiest to find in academia, where the cost of straying from orthodoxy is ostracisation at best, loss of career at worst. London’s King’s College apologized publicly for posting a photograph, from 2002, of the late Prince Philip, a governor of the College since the Eisenhower Administration, opening a university library with the Queen. King’s apology read: “Through feedback and subsequent conversations, we have come to realise the harm that this caused members of our community, because of [Prince Philip’s] history of racist and sexist comments. We are sorry to have caused this harm.” (Note: on campuses today, “harm” means people not liking something, and “violence” means any discomfort caused to sensitive souls by words they don’t like, never actual physical violence).
To get a perfect 11, though, we have to cite New Zealand school club “School Strike 4 Climate,” which actually cancelled itself because it “has been a racist, white-dominated space.” Wielding the barbed whip on their own backs like self-flagellating medieval monks, the youth mea culpa’ed that they had “avoided, ignored, and tokenised BIPOC voices and demands, especially those of Pasifika and Māori individuals in the climate activism space,” and closed up shop. Justice done, topping out the Oswalt Scale to boot.
Many of us were raised to believe you should own up to your mistakes, and to admire people who do. Will Smith was wrong to slap Chris Rock, but he was right to apologize and did so with grace. In today’s murderous politics and public life, however, modesty or apology for anything short of physical violence only chums the water for the sharks. Donald Trump had a way of saying what others were afraid to, without a shred of tact or diplomacy, flaming bridges in every direction. He survived it all because he never once conceded he was wrong; he never, ever apologized, even for the most egregious outbursts. The rest of the entertainment industry should set Smith’s as the bar for needing to apologise. Despite what the campus thought police thinks, words are not violence; slapping someone is.