This apology mania is getting out of hand. It’s bad enough to have to beg for forgiveness for every perceived slight or insult. Now, Jesse Jackson has taken it a step further by issuing apologies when most of us didn’t even know what he was sorry for.

Only after Jackson jumped before the cameras to issue his mea culpa did we learn that he had criticized—in front of an open mic—the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama for “talking down to black people” by supporting federally funded faith-based initiatives. For that, Jackson said he would like to cut off Obama’s testicles.

So, when I had turned on the TV, I had no clue about what Jackson was apologizing for. It didn’t help when he tried to explain the meaning of what he said:
“It does not reflect any disparagement on my part for the historic event in which we are involved or my pride in Senator Barack Obama who is leading it whom I have supported by crisscrossing this nation in every level of media and audience from the beginning in absolute terms.”

Come again?

“I think he has had to do in a very masterful way have a message that was very broad-based as broad from Vermont to Mexico from Washington to Florida and that’s a broader message than an ethnocentric message.”

Jackson said he doesn’t remember exactly what he said but that he was “very sorry” for whatever it was. And whatever it was, it was just a “sidelightinabroaderconversationabouturbandisparities,” so, I guess we’re not supposed to take it so seriously.

Here we should apply the standard “what-if” test: What if a white person had said—as Jackson said of Barack Obama—that he’d like to “cut off his nuts.” Jackson would be calling every newsroom in the county to speak from this script: “This abhorrent talk is a reminder of the animosity, contempt and hatred for the black man held by American society. It is the classic example of how America has sought to castrate the black man, to turn him into a eunuch. White society still is afflicted with the view that the only safe black man is a non-man, so his manhood should be extracted, as it were, from him. We must strive to restore the black man’s manhood.”

Of course, Jackson can’t make that point now, because he was the castrator.

What provoked Jackson’s ire apparently was Obama’s call for greater male responsibility in the black community. Jackson jabbered something about how Obama must offer programs that “go beyond personal responsibility.”

Jackson never really explained himself adequately in all the words that flowed after he got caught saying what was truly on his mind and in his heart. But somehow he made the leap in logic that Obama’s newly discovered support of federal “faith-based” initiatives is connected to “talking down to black people” and the need for fathers in the black community to take responsibility for their children.

The multiple ironies of it all:

This from a guy who has made his fortune using the pulpit to talk down to black people, by keeping alive the perception that their lives are miserable because they’re still on the white man’s plantation. This from the guy who used that perception to pressure Anheuser-Busch into granting his sons a lucrative distributorship.

And speaking of children: This from a guy who fathered his own love child with his mistress, Karin Standford, and then, according to her, neglected his own responsibilities to the child. This from a guy who lectures the rest of us about our various responsibilities, when he criticizes Obama for bringing up illegitimacy—if I might still use that word—which is, or ought to be (check out the horrifying numbers of black children being raised without a father), a huge issue in the black community.

We can only hope that Jackson has made such a complete fool out of himself that this time he’ll never be taken seriously again.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board.