It isn’t even a non-apology apology.
Littlemore than two weeks ago, both Curmie and I wrote about the ridiculous “RayGun,” aka. Rachel Gunn, who made a travesty of the Olympics breakdancing event (which was arguably a travesty from its inception anyway) and who may have rigged the Oceana competition to represent Australia in order to get a free trip to Paris in exchange for making an ass of herself.
Now, apparently sensing that her metaphorical 15 minutes of infamy was expiring, she’s in the news again for issuing what the ethically-inert news media is terming an “apology.” In an interview with the Australian current affairs show “The Project” the 37-year-old university lecturer said this week that she is “very sorry for the backlash that the [break-dancing] community has experienced” following her performance.
You can’t apologize for what someone else has done when you have no control over it. That’s the other common definition of “sorry”: “feeling distress, especially through sympathy with someone else’s misfortune.” There is nothing in that statement at all that suggests that Gunn regrets anything she did.
Of the unethical apologies on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, Gunn’s statement comes closest to #9, “Deceitful apologies, in which the wording of the apology is crafted to appear apologetic when it is not (‘if my words offended, I am sorry’). Another variation: apologizing for a tangential matter other than the act or words that warranted an apology.” However, all Gunn is doing is saying that other parties did something wrong (the “backlash”) and she’s sorry that they did.
In the same interview she said that her breaking style is “just a different approach” to the sport. This immediately reminded me of an exchange in “The River Wild.” Murderous criminal Kevin Bacon has just shown his true character to a boy whom he had pretended to befriend in order force the boy’s family into helping Bacon and his accomplice to escape with their haul from a robbery. The betrayed boy tells him, “I thought you were a nice guy.” Bacon replies, “I am a nice guy. Just a different kind of nice guy.”
Bacon’s character is a sociopath. I think RayGun might be one too.
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Pointer: Old Bill
Ethics Alarms 
When I saw her “perform” all I could think was Dunning-Kruger. I see it in the theater often; the actor that comes in bragging about their body of work only to end up having their lines hidden in a prop because they were unable to get off book. Her apology tells me I may not be wrong.