So far the Mayor hasn’t left his defensive crouch about the conduct and qualifications of his cronies in the County Building fire. He defended James Joyce yesteday, whose only qualification to be Fire Commissioner is that he is, well, a Joyce.
But as to Joyce’s lame apology yesterday, Eric Zorn has it exactly right in today’s Tribune:
A SORRY SORRY
Let’s take a closer look, shall we, at Chicago Fire Commissioner James Joyce’s attempt at damage control. Monday:
"If the families of those who died took my words spoken Friday to mean I wouldn’t change the result of this tragic fire, I apologize," began the critical passage.
OK, stop right there.
Joyce was directing the "apology" to those people who so totally and uncharitably misunderstood his words spoken Friday that they believed he wouldn’t change the "result" -six deaths – of the Cook County Administration Building fire.
Are there any such people? Did anyone off or on the record ever imply that Joyce wanted six people to die?
Of course not.
But there are a lot of people who felt Joyce’s words "spoken Friday" were inappropriately defensive, nonchalant and even incoherent:
"I don’t think there’s anything we would do differently," he said during that Friday news conference. "Would we be smarter next time? I’m sure we would be."
One cannot be "smarter next time" yet not do anything differently.
Critical to a graceful apology is the embrace of responsibility.
All apologies that begin with "if" are attempts by those who gave offense to shift at least some of the blame onto those (implicitly oversensitive people) who took it.
And any apology that exaggerates umbrage into vicious hysteria crosses the line into insincere.
Back to Monday: "What I was trying to get across," Joyce went on, "was that each fire is different. What doesn’t change is the method of attacking such a ferocious fire."
But, in fact, the methodology of the fire department here was and remains in question, and what everyone from the families of the victims to those who frequently enter high-rises wants to hear is exactly what went wrong and what Joyce is going to do to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
"We will consider everything we learned that night," he concluded.
That’s a start.