Bad Apples

In his book, The Way We Talk Now, Geoff Nunberg writes, “Proverbs are like other traditions—they owe their longevity to how easy it is to reinterpret what they mean.”  He goes on to explain.  The proverb, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” suggests a traditional wisdom about travel, but the Scots say it means “moving around keeps you fresh and free.” The English, on the other hand, use it to mean “moving around keeps you poor and rootless.” Americans use the proverb both ways. “If it is a proverb, it can’t help being wise,” says Nunberg.

We use the proverb about “a few bad apples,” whenever misconduct occurs in the midst of some organization.  It’s an ancient wisdom, “whether it’s said of bad apples or rotten ones, or of bushels, barrels, baskets, or bins.”  Benjamin Franklin said  “the rotten apple soils his companion,” which comes directly from Shakespeare’s time.  “A bad apple spoils the bin,” one journalist wrote in 1898 of the Dreyfus Affair; if one officer is capable of forgery then why wouldn’t others be as well?”

In 1970, the Osmond Brothers reversed the meaning of this proverb about the “bad apple” in their first number one hit, “One Bad Apple (Don’t Spoil the Whole Bunch, Girl).”  And it seems that a lot of people think that is how the proverb goes nowadays, even if it doesn’t make agronomical sense.  Those who know their apples know better—but few of us know about apples these days since we don’t have to worry about long-term storage and the only bins of apples we see are in the grocery, and the rotten ones usually never make it that far.

The statement “Like and Share” if you Support our Military or our Police, etc., often appears on my Facebook Timeline.  The whole basket is put out there without any sorting out of the bad actors (apples) who as Franklin said, “soil…companions.”  The fact that bad actors are in the military and among the police is well-known, from the U.S. atrocities (hardly ever recognized) of WWII, Vietnam, and  Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Police across the nation have bad apples too.  

One of the spoils of any kind of war (cultural, political, or otherwise) is that of writing its history. Not only do those who win get to set the terms of the surrender and peace, but they also get to recast the past so as to reshape the future.  Our history books say little about our own war crimes—our own bad apples—but always describes the crimes of the enemy.  So, too, in this day of alternate realities, we are attempting to recast the image of our military and our police.  Not all military, not all police, are good apples (heroes).  Not all the generation Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest” were great.  That’s reality—and while I, like so many others, would like for the story to be different, would like an alternative reality—the facts do not support it.  It is said that “A proverb can’t lie.”  The Osmond Brothers song is a statement of an alternative reality.   “A bad apple,” does indeed, “spoil the bin.”  We’d like to say that there are “just a few bad apples” or “only a few rotten apples” and not enough to taint the group.  Or we’d like to say “There are always going to be a few bad apples,” which is like saying there is evil in the world; just get over it!