I’m guessing that, based on this piece in Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens wasn’t impressed with Gibson’s apology.
There’s a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or “unaddressed” problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don’t form picket lines outside movie theaters when “stereotyped,” but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as “a pronouncement from the chair”). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.
This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or “deicide.”
Bill Maher agrees: alcohol didn’t cause Gibson’s outburst against jews.
Yes, liquor releases demons, but I want to know why the demon in Mel Gibson is hatred of the Jews to begin with . . . He, I believe, at least fights with himself about this. But he’ll never win as long as he’s so religious, because, I hate to tell you, the disease isn’t alcholism, the disease is religion.
The best description I've heard of drunkenness is that it weakens inhibitions, so it *amplifies* a person's existing personality. If a person is happy, she becomes gleeful; if he is hostile, he becomes violent; if she is sad, she becomes despondent; if he is an anti-Semite, he becomes a ranting bigot. According to this model, alcohol would not turn Gibson into an anti-Semite; it would merely magnify his existing bigotry — bigotry that he would have kept under control but for the alcohol.
I find it laughable that Mel thinks he can dupe people into believing he didn't mean what he said. Being drunk doesn't mean you're not responsible for your words- and while he did "take responsibility" by issuing an apology, he claims that he didn't mean any of it. That it was just the alcohol- but as many of us know, a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts.
In some ways I do pity him. It couldn't have been easy growing up to be a wise adult with a religious bigot like his father- but hopefully the public's outcry will help him see the error of his ways. Although, I hoped the same for Tom Cruise after everyone began hating him for his religious zealotry- but as we can all see, that had very little effect. *sigh*
The age old problem of Jew hatred is excellently chronicled in a book I recommend to all who are interested in its history. James Carroll's CONSTANTINE'S SWORD does a marvelous job of laying it all out.
It is for the most part a species of blaming the Outsider for one's own shortcomings, but in a man like Gibson–talented, lucky, fortunate in almost all the ways we rate such things–it makes little sense. Except perhaps if we take the drive he has exhibited in his career as a headlong pursuit of a pulpit from which to scream "the truth" at the world.
Only, largely the world doesn't much care for the message anymore. At least the part of the world he's trying to "save".