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As many people have hastened to point out, my off-the-cuff Civil War knowledge is flawed. Last week I wrote that Grant commanded draftees at Antietam, a battle also known as Sharpsburg.
However, the Battle of Antietam began on Sept. 17, 1862. The federal draft did not start until 1863. Grant was still in Tennessee at the time; McClellan commanded the Union forces in Maryland.
There might be a graceful way of handling such errors, but I've yet to discover it.
You can try the White House Approach. As soon as the
stupid mistake is discovered by the predatory media, a
spokesman can call a press conference. He will announce
that Mr. Quillen was misunderstood by everyone in the
room. He actually said 'Spotsylvania,' not 'Antietam.' As
everyone knows, Gen. Grant was in full command at the
Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in May of 1864, and his
army then did include draftees.
Or I could utilize the high-tech culprit with Blame the
Computer. Gee, I don't know how we ended up with
Antietam instead of Spotsylvania or Wilderness. I'm sure it
was right when I inputted the data. But you know how
computers are -- haven't you ever gotten nine copies of the
same magazine, or a phone bill for $9,857.14?
Perhaps the Sympathy Method would work. Few of us can
comprehend the crushing burdens that face a columnist.
Especially on that hot Monday in August. A cousin called to
announce his imminent visit; thus an intensive
house-cleaning session was going on even as he struggled
for words. As the vacuum cleaner howled, only a room away,
the writer struggled for each word. His very sanity
demanded that he complete the column as quickly as
possible; under those trying circumstances, anyone would
understand why he failed to reach for an encyclopedia
before transmitting his work.
There's the old Journalistic Wisecrack. Doctors bury
their mistakes. We print ours.
Or a political favorite -- You Missed the Point, You
Idiot. The issue was that the poor have always borne a
disproportionate share of the casualties in American
conflicts, ever since the first military draft. To quibble
over the name of a battle is mere nit-picking that
distracts from our very real concerns, and such
hairsplitting does not deserve the dignity of a
reply.
A writer's frequent option is Blame the Editors.
Look, Jack Kisling and Bob Ewegen work in that office,
and they're both hard-core military history buffs. They're
walking encyclopedias of such lore, and I was relying on
them to catch it if I made a mistake on a battle.
The most common method, I suspect, is to recite the
Customary Aphorisms. Never apologize, never explain.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
Nobody's
perfect.
Lately, though, a popular maneuver is Turn the Tables.
Hey, it's really just a piece of trivia that doesn't
matter. If Antietam was important at all in the America of
1988, then the battle would be listed in the book,
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.
Antietam is not on the 64-page list. So there. And besides,
don't you have anything better to do than go around
fretting about such minor matters? Just what kind of person
are you, anyway? Don't you know that you must have severe
psychological and social problems if you're so immersed in
the past that you don't care about what's significant now?
You live in a romanticized world of blue and gray. You're
out of touch with reality. It sounds like incipient
schizophrenia. You need some professional help.
But none of those seems to convey what ought to be said,
something on the order of I blew it. It's entirely my
fault. I'm sorry. I'll try to make sure it doesn't happen
again, although it probably will.
With all the mistakes that get made, we should have better ways to deal with them. There are thousands of self-help books that teach you how to be successful, fulfilled and perfect, but there's nothing that explains any graceful ways to cover up the distressing fact that you sometimes lack those qualities.
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