Dreaming of a heartfelt apology

In my dream the whole nation had been inspired by the apologies given in parliament. Everywhere long-suppressed shames and feelings of remorse bubbled to the surface. Radio 2GB apologised for Alan Jones and Sky News and the Herald Sun begged forgiveness for Andrew Bolt.

The Prime Minister began a cleansing apology for the character and deeds of the Liberal Party. He apologised for Philip Ruddock and Peter Dutton, but more momentously apologised for his party’s ugly collusion with a disgraceful governor-general to have the Whitlam government sacked.

“Australia, please, please forgive us [the Liberal Party]”, he pleaded, openly sobbing.

Meanwhile Canberra’s guilt-racked NIMBYs met (packing the Albert Hall) and issued a joint apology to Canberra for all the occasions on which in their hard-heartedness they fought and defeated attempts to locate the working-classes and the deserving, battling poor (sometimes plucky recovering addicts) in their bourgeois suburbs.

Andrew Barr’s ACT government, responding, issued a sincere apology to Canberra for all of the occasions since self-government on which ACT governments had been so spineless as to give in to the unreasonable and un-Christian agitations of Canberra’s NIMBYs and FWWs (First World Whingers).

The federal parliament of 1908 (coming to life in that eerie way the dead often do in dreams) apologised to the nation for its folly in selecting God-forsaken Canberra as the site for the federal capital city.

Then I woke up.

All good-hearted Australians will hope that Monday’s national apologies will work some healing magic in the lives of those who have been apologised to.

And yet what strange, poorly-fitting creatures they are, these sorts of national apologies like Monday’s.

In national apologies like Monday’s we find national leaders personally apologising for things they didn’t personally do and apologising on behalf of a whole nation that, too, is generally innocent of the wickedness in question.

John Howard almost had a point, albeit a typically mean-spirited, small-minded one, when during his 11 years as prime minister he refused to apologise for past wrongs done to the First Australians, arguing, “I do not believe, as a matter of principle, that one generation can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation.”

Then, too, some national “apologies”, like Monday’s and like UK prime minister Tony Blair’s 1997 unapologetic apology for the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852 (slithering, Blair blamed it on “those who governed in London at the time”) ring less like true, straight-from-the-apologiser’s-heart apologies as common folk know them and more like righteous rebukes of those historically to blame.

Pope John Paul II had nothing personally to do with his church’s 17th-century persecutions of the polymath Galileo (1564-1642) for his, Galileo’s, monstrous scientific heresy that God’s Earth goes around the Sun and not vice versa. And yet somehow, mysteriously, this 20th-century pope took it upon his papacy to declare that Galileo had been right and the church had been wrong and that Galileo’s mistreatment had been tragic.

Somehow these sorts of public apologies by potentates don’t seem as true blue as the ones everyday folk give to one another.

And yet, “It turns out,” Edwin Battistella (a US professor and author of a recent book on national apologies) divines, “that apology at the national level is not so different from the process that individuals go through in apologising for a serious harm.”

The professor purrs persuasively that, “The first step is the recognition that there is something to apologise for, and that it is serious.

“This recognition - shared, ideally, by the offender and the harmed - informs the making of the apology itself. In its most sincere form, making an apology involves a naming of the offence, a condemnation of previous behaviour, and a request for forgiveness. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), the sociologist Erving Goffman described apology as splitting one’s self into two persons - a former guilty one and new one that condemns the past behaviour. The apologiser becomes a better person. Those receiving the apology are also changed by receiving a sincere gesture of respect. Honour is restored.”

Last Monday did we see an apologising Australia divide into two nations? Will the newer Australia be a better one, with a new determination to treasure and protect its children?

Watching Wednesday’s Question Time in the House of Representatives I fell asleep again and, dreaming, rejoined the prime minister’s epic apology for the Liberal Party.

He begged the nation’s forgiveness for all the occasions on which fawning Liberal prime ministers, in their narcissism so anxious to be admired as men of steel by whoever was Leader of the Free World at the time, had so obediently taken us into the warlike USA’s miscellaneous wars and invasions. He wept as he regretted the horror and unhappiness inflicted on Australians by our Liberal-led government’s embroiling of us in the Vietnam War and then in the invasion of Iraq.

Invoking Erving Goffman, he vowed that this new, apologising party had become a better party and that never again would a Liberal prime minister be the fawning “all the way with LBJ” poodle of a US president.

Then I woke up.