Tonight’s Letterman Apology-Non Apology.
by Him on Oct.06, 2009, under The Late Show With David Letterman
As promised I checked out Letterman’s monologue tonight. He did apologize to his staff, for causing an intrusion and disruption into their lives with his actions and what he said Thursday. He didn’t however apologize outright to his wife on the air. He touched on the subject and acknowledged he hurt her, and it’s up to him to fix it, and through some of his jokes admitted she’s pretty angry with him.
The more I thought about it though, I don’t have a problem that he didn’t apologize to his wife on the tube. When you get past the public extortion plot, he’s dealing with perhaps marital indiscretions (if the affairs occurred while married), or at the very least cheating on his then girlfriend if it happened before he got married. Which really, isn’t much better. As he said, he has to fix it, and while an acknowledgement that he hurt his wife on air may be part of the healing process for both of them… it certainly is only one very small part of the fixing he has to do. Most of which probably is better done privately.
It was also very interesting to watch how he handled his body language tonight when talking about it. It obviously was well thought out, and it very well may have been vetted by his lawyer. However, it didn’t seem as picture perfect as the story did Thursday. He seemed to look down at his desk a lot as opposed to looking at the camera. I interpreted what he was doing tonight to be much more about his feelings and thoughts and about the personal mess he found himself in. Thursday was about getting the story out before the headlines, Thursday was show business. Tonight, I think, may have been a little more personal.
Of course, what do I know. If only we could get Lie To Me’s Dr. Cal Lightman to interpret the tapes. Then we’d have some answers.
