354: Mistakes Were Made
This American Life episode 354 explores the theme of insincere apologies through multiple stories: a discussion of politicians' non-apologies, a detailed account of Bob Nelson's failed cryonics experiments in 1960s-70s California, and a poetic segment riffing on William Carlos Williams' 'This Is Just to Say.' The episode examines how people avoid genuine accountability while maintaining the facade of remorse.
Summary
The episode opens with a meditation on insincere apologies, using examples from politicians like Hong Kong's chief executive and contrasting the era when politicians at least felt obliged to apologize with the current climate where public figures like Donald Trump openly refuse. The host discusses the challenge of forcing genuine remorse in children, noting that even hollow apologies serve a purpose by acknowledging a moral code exists. This leads into a retelling of the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba, where the prophet Nathan uses an indirect fable to make King David recognize his own wrongdoing — suggesting that indirect confrontation may be more effective at eliciting genuine accountability.
The bulk of Act One follows Bob Nelson, a TV repairman with no scientific training who became president of the Cryonics Society of California in the 1960s. Bob froze a series of bodies — including psychology professor James Bedford, society members Marie Sweet and Helen Klein, a seven-year-old girl named Geneviève dying of cancer, and others — despite having no proper funding, facilities, or equipment. He stored bodies in a mortician's garage in makeshift wooden coolers filled with dry ice, secretly packed multiple bodies into a single capsule meant for one person without informing the families, and allowed capsules to fail due to equipment breakdowns and lack of funds. When the second capsule catastrophically failed — Bob touched the pipe and found it hot as a frying pan — he claims to have personally visited the families of the deceased to inform them. However, both Geneviève's father Guy and Terry Harris (whose parents were in the capsule) deny ever receiving such visits, suggesting Bob fabricated or misremembered these acts of contrition. Bob eventually conceded the Montreal airport visit with Guy may have been a false memory, but refused to budge on his account of meeting Terry Harris.
The cryonics disaster became public in 1979 when Terry Harris and his brother led a news crew to the Chatsworth vault and found decomposed remains. Bob was sued for $800,000, with half paid through the mortician's malpractice insurance. Bob maintained he had done right by the people in his care under difficult circumstances, arguing he cared too much rather than too little, and that the Anatomical Gift Act gave the society legal rights over the bodies. Despite everything, Bob saved $28,000 for his own cryonic suspension, which was carried out when he died in June 2018. He now awaits reanimation at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan alongside cryonics founder Robert Ettinger.
Act Two uses William Carlos Williams' poem 'This Is Just to Say' — a man's note to his wife admitting he ate her plums without real apology — as a framework for exploring non-apologies in miniature. Contributors including Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Starlee Kine, Jonathan Goldstein, Shalom Auslander, and Heather O'Neill wrote their own variations on the poem, each escalating the transgression while maintaining the poem's structure of confession-without-remorse.
Key Insights
- The host argues that even insincere political apologies serve a social function by acknowledging that a moral code exists, which he finds preferable to politicians who refuse to apologize at all.
- Bob Nelson claimed his primary mistake in the cryonics disaster was 'caring too much,' framing his deception and negligence as the byproduct of excessive compassion rather than irresponsibility.
- Bob Nelson appears to have constructed a false memory of personally visiting bereaved families to deliver bad news — a memory that both families deny — suggesting the human mind can fabricate acts of moral courage one wishes one had performed.
- The Biblical story of David and Bathsheba is presented as evidence that indirect confrontation through storytelling ('you are the man') can produce genuine remorse where direct accusation cannot.
- Bob Nelson secretly packed multiple bodies into a single cryonics capsule without informing the families, justifying the secrecy by saying it would have been an unnecessary burden to tell them — a rationalization that masked the real risk of compounding failure.
- Despite the Chatsworth disaster and the $800,000 lawsuit against him, Bob Nelson remained a true believer in cryonics and spent his own savings to be frozen himself, framing the failed suspensions as 'casualties of progress' rather than negligence.
- Terry Harris, who lost both parents to the cryonics failure, still does not know where his parents' remains are decades later, as the cemetery reports they were removed without legal permits by an unknown party.
- William Carlos Williams' 'This Is Just to Say' is analyzed as a structural template for non-apology: the word 'forgive me' functions as a command rather than a request, and the speaker's explicit pleasure in the transgression undermines any claim of remorse.
Topics
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