The guy was drunk, for heaven’s sake. We all say and do dumb things when we are drunk. If I were to be judged on my drunken escapades and follies, I should be utterly excluded from polite society, and so would you, unless you are some kind of saint. And those pilers-on? Well, just bear in mind that they are people who lay out great wads of money to buy houses in districts where their kids won’t have to go to school with too many black or Hispanic classmates. Let him who is without sin…
What about in vino veritas? Aren’t we seeing the real Mel here? Isn’t the courteous, civilized, thoughtful Mel just a mask he wears to deceive us? Well, duh, of course it is! That’s what civilization means — masking the Old Adam with good habits, good manners, nice clothes, social graces, well-constructed sentences full of soft words. The Old Adam is still there underneath, as anyone with any self-knowledge at all knows perfectly well. Fill up Christopher Hitchens with liquor, or Jonah Goldberg, or Kathryn Lopez, or Deroy Murdock, or John Derbyshire, and see what you get. Chances are, you won’t like it half as much as you like the stuff we put out when we’re sober. Chances are not negligible you might hear something offensively insulting about Jews, or Gentiles, or blacks, or whites, or Brits, or papists.
The above appears in Derbyshire's July Diary, the entirety of which is here.
4 comments:
Defending Mel Gibson is not the point. What this event demonstrates: those on the right praise their own until they fall from grace, and then these folks are revealed to be liberals. Bush fails because he is really a liberal, so the argument goes. Well, he fails because he swallowed the neoconservative cool-aid. Greenwald and Digby have written about this phenomenon at length.
I never thought Bush was a conservative, not with those budgets. He was, to me, preferable to the alternative.
I never even knew Mel Gibson's politics. He lost me with "Lethal Weapon II" and "III."
His politics, again, are beside the point. I don't care about him either. The right wing response to his drunken tirade IS important because it demonstrates a common and dishonest rhetorical technique.
Greenwald identifies some aspects of his politics, just for the record:
Gibson crusades against stem cell research and has a long history of vulgar and extreme anti-gay commentary. He belongs to a "splinter Catholic group that rejects the modern papacy and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council." His campaign to defend The Passion began by "screening it for evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, right-wing pundits, Republicans, a few Jewish commentators and Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah," and attacks on The Passion were routinely depicted by Gibson's right-wing defenders as a left-wing assault on religion and Christianity.
And I never thought Bush was conservative either. Most of the Republicans aren't. It is an advertising tag.
I don't know what one could characterize as "the" Right-Wing response to Gibson at this point. Derbyshire's, for example, is disimilar to Hugh Hewitt's, who termed Gibson's apology "only a beginning." But I'll read Greenwald see further.
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