Huh?

Someone has to post here, so it may as well be me. This is in part a follow up to my last post and part just my weak-willed submission to overwhelming temptation. (WARNING! Some righty-baiting follows.)

I’m not noticeably fond of Christopher Hitchens, but in Mel Gibson’s Meltdown he has, as it were, the wind behind him. I think the sub-title He is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred is too much, taking in psychoanalysing one’s subject (‘sick’) and being culturally patronising (’empty’), though ‘Jew-hatred’ may be more or less on the nail. Probably not Hitchens’ fault, but the portrait of Gibson Slate chose to illustrate the piece, apparently showing the actor attempting to pass a kidney stone should be rated as unkind. And we’re treated to one of “teh Dude”‘s rather strained apothegms:

Englishmen don’t form picket lines outside movie theaters when “stereotyped,” but still.

Which is just as well if they want to see any cinematic performances at all. Perhaps the greatest innovation in Hollywood in recent years was Die Hard which used an English actor in radically different role: playing a, wait for it, German bad guy! Roll out that accent, Herr Rickman! (And I suppose Peter Cushing, Don Henderson and co in Star Wars are technically aliens, but still.) English actors are stereotyped as bad guys in US movies, unless they’re Hugh Grant, who is stereotyped an unspeakable excrescence. But that may be typecasting.

Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism.

I never understood that. He talked a lot (‘talk’ and ‘action’ are horribly confused in David Horowitz’s brain, but so is everything else), but ‘defended family values’? — against whom? or what? One of the pleasures of being something of an aged blogger is that you can look up old posts. I was clearly quite moved by the whole ‘Passion’ thing and posted on it more than once.

Jesus himself is explicit: his message is not “do what I say”, it’s “do what I do” and it’s the doing — being charitable and forgiving — that counts, not nationality, nor denominational or temporal affiliation, nor who your parents are or what they did.

Mel Gibson looks bigger on ‘do as I say’ than ‘do as I do.’
Related fun: Artist’s reenactment of the arrest.
Now, I don’t think Gibson is guilty of a hate crime (anyway, drunk driving and speeding at nearly twice the legal limit — which he was: “87 miles per hour in a 45 miles per hour zone” — are far more of a hazard than name-calling). But it’s useful to know this sort of thing about a person so one can avoid him and his films in future. Not that I’ve seen much of his output outside of ‘Lethal Weapon’ so he won’t be filing for bankruptcy on my account.
But here’s where the fun really starts. In my last post, I opined that Chris Muir was an untalented hack (and, I should have added, one whose depictions of the female form are evidently derived from a life-drawing of two pythons mating under a blanket). Now, I’m prepared to go even further. I remember being perplexed at this cartoon — and perplexed enough to be able to find it two years later. Is that the lamest defence he can come up with? It’s like he’s trying. And would he defend The Last Temptation of Christ the same way?