The curious case of Andrew Dodson, a former graduate student at the University of Arkansas, offers a case study in the uses and abuses of apologizing. He's the 33-year-old whose image appeared all over the country during the late unpleasantness at Charlottesville, Va., and to top it off--or rather bottom it out--he was wearing a T-shirt with "Arkansas Engineering" emblazoned on it like a badge of dishonor.
Now he's apologized for the spectacle and embarrassment he caused for the school and its students. "I'm sorry they suffered because of this," he said. And he had a lot to be sorry for.
Unfortunately for him and the university, a photograph of Mr. Dodson walking with other demonstrators, and holding a lighted torch to boot, instantly spread all over social media in this age of instantaneous communication. "Other people are suffering for what I did," Andrew Dodson confessed. Those people included the chancellor at UA, Joe Steinmetz, who wasted no time in disassociating himself and his university from Andrew Dodson's actions, declaring in his tweet: "Diversity & inclusion are @Uarkansas values. Not this."
If only the hapless Mr. Dodson had stopped while he was ahead and said no more. But his type never do, do they? Instead of simply apologizing and resolving it would never happen again, as some of us were taught in the military, Mr. Dodson just had to go on and on and on ad nauseam. He's no white supremacist, he declared. "I've been to a number of rallies and things," he said, "and it wasn't like this bloodbath." He said he "wasn't thinking" when he wore the T-shirt to the rally, having donned it for the airplane trip there. He appears not to have been thinking at all--before, during and after the blood-stained rally in Virginia, home of Thomas Jefferson of all advocates of reason and free speech.
Andrew Dodson ignored Rule No. 1 for people who have dug themselves into a rhetorical hole: Stop digging.
Mr. Dodson said he was at this rally that turned bloody to hear speakers like Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right in this country, whose speeches reverberate with phrases all too reminiscent of Nazi ideology--like "Blood and soil!"--wherever they've marched, in this case on the University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville before it became a scene from Dante's Inferno. But documents filed in court in an attempt to stop the rally described it as simply a demonstration against the city of Charlottesville's plan to move a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. Yet an organizer of the march, Jason Kessler, described it accurately enough as a "pro-white" rally.
No wonder an English statesman named Benjamin Disraeli, who served as prime minister not once but twice, once advised: Never complain, never explain. It's been cited by any number of British leaders since, from royalty to astute parliamentarians like Winston Churchill, who was nobody's fool.
Andrew Dodson, however, remains a font of counsel, now saying he's interested in subversive ideologies like those pushed by Identity Evropa, which sounds as fascist as they come. Its online membership form asks potential members whether they or their spouses are of "European, non-Semitic" heritage. Gentle Reader needn't read its propaganda to tell what this outfit is up to.
"I think that black people ought to have a strong view of black heritage and white people ought to have a strong white heritage," says Andrew Dodson in the best or rather worst separate-but-equal style, "and we ought not erase the history [of either one.] There's a lot of bad things that have happened on both sides, but let's not forget it and repeat it."
What a noble sentiment he expresses in defense of such an ignoble cause. Will he ever learn better or is he uneducable? The hope of redemption is eternal, but for some it seems still distant.
Editorial on 08/26/2017