antisemitic bastard

Music: Boards of Canada: THe Campfire Headphase (2005)

You can get the story of Bro. Mel's drunken, anti-Jewish screed by clicking the photo. If that's not enough, you can go here and here too for more about his long and well documented hatred of Jews. You know, I wanted to title this post The Protocols of Mel Gibson, but I see Katha Pollitt had beat me to it years ago.

Obviously a seasoned officer, the recipient of Gibson's abuse said what many of us are thinking: "There’s two things that booze does. It amplifies your basic personality. If you are a laid-back kind of person, just an easy going kind of person, booze is going to amplify that and you’ll be just sitting around going how it’s a wonderful day. But, if you are high-strung person, it’s going to amplify that and all the bad things are going to come out."

To this I would only add that art is a similar intoxicant, and perhaps in ways that better amplify the less conscious content of one's "basic personality." With The Passion of the Christ film's tacit promotion of Christian rage (and violence, and homophobia, oh, and antisemitism), we can only wonder what other "basic personality" traits would have been aired with Gibson's now defunct mini-series of the Jewish Holocaust. Apparently, Gibson was in cahoots with Disney/ABC for some years on the project, which was to bring a Dutch Jew's memoir to the small screen! This from a guy whose dad is a racist jerk and who really stepped in it a couple of years ago by stating the Jewish Holocaust was exaggerated. Gibson defended daddy as a truth teller, you'll recall. And Gibson was working with Disney . . . the company once run by a not-so-secret Jew-hater and Nazi sympathizer (good ol' Wally, baby!). The company pulled the project this morning, for crying out loud! To parrot Slavoj Zizek one more time: the unconscious is out there people! We can't make this shit up!

My diagnosis: like Tom Cruise, Gibson is really an android.