Mel Gibson and war

You probably expect me to make snide comments about Mel Gibson's drunk driving episode and the subsequent revelation of his ghastly behavior during the arrest and booking. Truth be told, I did allow myself a few captious snickers while reading the news to my ladyfriend. In the end, though, the whole affair made me sad.

Long time readers know that I do not admire Passion of the Christ. But Mel Gibson has done a lot of good work, and he deserves to be judged for his best efforts, not for one horrible night. John Huston killed a man while driving drunk (the studio hushed up the incident), but that tragedy doesn't make Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Man Who Would be King any less brilliant.

Gibson's anti-Semitic outburst -- "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" -- was, of course, inane and odious. I agree with Josh Marshall's response: "People do say all sorts of things when they're crazy drunk. But with Gibson, there's a history."

Intriguingly, that offensive remark hints that Mel Gibson does not support either our bloody Iraq misadventure or Israel's vandalism in Lebanon. If that is true, then why did he not voice his opposition before? Instead of this drunken lapse into the lowest sort of anti-Semitic conspiracism, Gibson could have offered rational arguments against the current madness.

Mel Gibson still has the opportunity to make such an argument in a public forum, and he can do so with a force unavailable to any other Hollywood figure. The fundamentalists who blindly support Bush's atrocities will never listen to a Martin Sheen, but they will hear out the man who made Passion of the Christ.

Similarly, Gibson has, in the past, offered hints that he views the Bush family with suspicion. Why not offer more than a hint?

I'm not sure how Bush-entranced fundamentalists would respond to an anti-war pronouncement by Mel Gibson. The Protestant leaders who embraced Passion would suddenly be forced to admit the profound theological and cultural differences separating the evangelicals from "breakaway" Catholics such as Gibson and his father, who reject the Vatican II reforms.

A side note: Very few people in the "Passion" audience understood why Gibson included a Last Supper flashback in which Jesus declares that his blood would be shed "for many." Although the details resist easy summary here, I can say that this scene underscores a decades-old controversy over the translation of the Mass into the vernacular -- a controversy which relates, in turn, to a larger debate over the old doctrine of "no salvation outside the Church." The film's many Protestant admirers never realized that Sedevacantism -- the technical term for the doctrine underlying Gibson's traditionalism -- emerged, in large part, as a reaction against the Vatican II reforms which reclassified Protestants as "separated brethren" instead of heretics. (Sedevacantists believe that every Pope since the Second Vatican Council has been false.)