GOODY TWO SHOES: Are Gibson’s Critics Drunk On Schadenfreude?

 

Oy gevalt! So Mel Gibson – who has been battling alcoholism most of his adult life – goes out, parties hearty, gets plastered, drives while impaired, throws his weight around when police officers pull him over, then makes several crude sexist and anti-Semitic remarks. Suddenly alcohol is a “truth serum” and Gibson was only saying what is really in his Hebrew-hating heart.

 

People often do and say mean, idiotic and incomprehensible things while under the influence of spirits – and cell phone manufacturer LG Electronics, for one, wants to capitalize on saving inebriated people from themselves. A newly introduced model has a built-in sensor that sniffs out booze on a caller’s breath. Why would anyone need such a device? Because drunken dialing – for example, “shooting pictures of your drunken antics with your camera phone” and sending them “to your boss with an insulting text message” – is prevalent enough that LG thinks it can make a buck or two. The phone even blocks certain phone numbers, so that one doesn’t, say, call an ex-lover to pronounce oneself a fool for breaking up, profess undying devotion and propose marriage. Clearly, booze is not sodium pentothal.

 

Some of Gibson’s friends have come to his defense, including Patrick Swayze, Jodie Foster and Dean Devlin, a movie producer who is Jewish. Swayze called Gibson “a wonderful human being” and insisted that he is “not anti-Semitic.” These sentiments were echoed by Foster: "Is he an anti-Semite? Absolutely not. But it's no secret that he has always fought a terrible battle with alcoholism." For his part, Devlin noted that, “If Mel is an anti-Semite, then he spends a lot of time with us, which makes no sense.” He added, “But he is an alcoholic, and while that makes no excuse for what he said, because there is no excuse, I believe it was the disease speaking, not the man.”

 

The fact that Gibson “by his own confession has been to the brink of suicide due to his war with alcoholism, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, underscores Jackie Mason’s belief that far too many people are getting a “viscious, sick, perverted thrill” out of his fall from grace.

 

In a hilarious interview (video) Friday on “Your World With Neil Cavuto” Mason made several telling quips: that people who say they would never work with Gibson again are “failures” who had never worked with him before, and that they are “envious, bitter and jealous” people who “finally found an excuse to bury this guy.” [NOTE: Check out Rob Schneider’s tongue-in-cheek full-page ad in Variety (not available online) last week announcing that, as “a 1/2 Jew” (the other half is Filipino), he would never work with Gibson, even if he “offered me the lead role in ‘Passion of the Christ 2’.” Talk about piling on! C’mon Rob, cut the guy a break, will ya?]

 

Mason also pointed out that Abe Foxman [National Director of the Anti-Defamation League] would soon be out of a job if he didn’t see racism and anti-Semitism everywhere. (By the way, Mason has a very pronounced  Brooklyn accent, and he is not saying what you think he’s saying each time he pronounces Foxman’s name.)

 

Mason, who was a rabbi before he became a comedian, also made an impassioned plea for charity and forgiveness: “His life has been a mecca of decency … How a guy lived for 50 years is what should count, not one remark when you’re drunk. … What did he ever do that’s anti-Jewish his whole life? A whole 50 years of decency doesn’t count because you make one remark?”

 

Amen, rabbi.

Posted by The Stiletto at August 7, 2006
Categories: Goody Two Shoes
 

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  • February 6, 2007 The Stiletto wrote:
    Performing at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood last Friday, Michael Richards (Seinfeld’s “Kramer”) responded to two black hecklers with a profanity-laced rant that included numerous uses of the “N word.” At one point during his onstage meltdown, he also screamed at the two, "Shut up! Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f------ fork up your a--." In a satellite interview on David Letterman's "Late Show" on Monday Richards insisted, "I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this." He also apologized, saying, "For me to be at a comedy club and flip out and ...
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