Heads hang in shame over apologies of 2017

If 2017 was anything, it was the Year of the Awful Apology.

That is, apologies that are so bad they require an apology.

To wit:

I apologize for Harvey Weinstein rationalizing his decades of sexually abusive and allegedly far worse behaviour toward women ( he denies all charges of non- consensual sex) with the “explanation” that “I came of age in the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, when all the rules about behaviour and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.”

Of course! We all remember the culture of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s right? You know, “make love not war” “ban the bomb,” “I have a dream,” and, “I’m so important and powerful that God created women so I could use them as my personal sexual doormats.”

I apologize for Vice Media co- founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi’s apology for the “boy’s club” culture they say was allowed to flourish under their watch at the painfully self- righteous new media company they founded in Montreal in 1994.

You know, a “boy’s club,” with secret handshakes, knowing the special password for admittance to the tree house, and, oh yeah, the widespread sexual harassment and abuse of Vice’s female staff that reportedly turned the place into a hellhole for women.

I apologize for Kevin Spacey, using the occasion of being accused of making unwanted sexual advances on a 14- year- old boy in 1986, when he was 26, to announce: “I choose now to live as a gay man,” as if the big concern about his egregious personal conduct, one of many incidents of horrible behaviour that have since come to light, is that he’s gay, and not about making an unwanted sexual advance on a 14- year- old.

I apologize for U. S. Sen. Al Franken being unable to come up with anything better about his multiple incidents of demeaning women than, in so many words, “Yeah, but Donald Trump was worse,” and for President Trump, who bragged about grabbing women by the crotch being unable to come up with anything better about his own allegedly disgraceful conduct towards women than by mocking Franken as “Al Frankenstein.” At least Franken said he’d quit.

I apologize for NBC claiming no one knew about Today show co- host Matt Lauer’s two decades of horrible treatment of women while in that job, when you’d think one clue might have been that time in 2001 when he used the self- locking mechanism to his door to lock himself in his office with a female employee, who has now accused him of sexual assault. She had passed out and woke up on the floor, at which point Lauer had his assistant take her to the nurse.

While the woman said she didn’t accuse Lauer of sexual assault at the time because she was embarrassed and ashamed and feared losing her job, was there nothing unusual enough about the circumstances of that incident — she’s passed out on the floor of Lauer’s office and his assistant takes her to the nurse — that might have twigged someone in charge to think that, gee, maybe they had a problem with their mega- star?

Finally, I apologize for Matt

Damon, who said at the height of the sexual abuse scandals that it was time to remember the good guys like himself who don’t abuse women, as if men should get brownie points for meeting the expected standard of civilized behaviour.

I can hardly wait for 2018.