I found Gaiman's original comment highly offensive - nobody with half a brain should be able to miss the insult in 'a few dead Indians.' I fully understand, from a writerly standpoint, what he was trying to say: he wanted a specific kind of graveyard history with everybody _buried in the same place_. He was being extremely insensitive in, as he said, the heat of the moment, which might just about be excusable _if_ he had caught himself, and if he had apologised profoundly.
Apologising to Icelandics and Norwegians makes things a lot worse. He thinks _they_ deserve an apology for something that is not offensive at all ('viking' is a profession, sort of, not an ethnicity, and there's a very high likelyhood that some of the people who settled in North America also went on raids during the summer months; _everybody_ did), but the millions of people he has just dismissed with a casual comment _don't_.
While I can, kind of, forgive a remark made by someone who is stressed and tired (as long as they address it afterwards), Neil Gaiman had plenty of opportunity to go away and think about what, exactly, he is saying. He's intelligent enough to read over his own words and consider their effect - he's a writer, that's his job - so subsequent fails are something I cannot excuse at all.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 08:31 am (UTC)I found Gaiman's original comment highly offensive - nobody with half a brain should be able to miss the insult in 'a few dead Indians.' I fully understand, from a writerly standpoint, what he was trying to say: he wanted a specific kind of graveyard history with everybody _buried in the same place_. He was being extremely insensitive in, as he said, the heat of the moment, which might just about be excusable _if_ he had caught himself, and if he had apologised profoundly.
Apologising to Icelandics and Norwegians makes things a lot worse. He thinks _they_ deserve an apology for something that is not offensive at all ('viking' is a profession, sort of, not an ethnicity, and there's a very high likelyhood that some of the people who settled in North America also went on raids during the summer months; _everybody_ did), but the millions of people he has just dismissed with a casual comment _don't_.
While I can, kind of, forgive a remark made by someone who is stressed and tired (as long as they address it afterwards), Neil Gaiman had plenty of opportunity to go away and think about what, exactly, he is saying. He's intelligent enough to read over his own words and consider their effect - he's a writer, that's his job - so subsequent fails are something I cannot excuse at all.