Essay 895

Stanley Crouch on Mel Gibson…

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Mel’s mea culpa a sorry excuse

Mel Gibson has gotten himself into trouble for saying that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

As expected, Gibson apologized and said that he has trouble with alcohol, which he allegedly had a snoot full of when he was stopped by the cops in California for drunken driving. In response, there are people climbing the walls and being interviewed about his statement and what he should do to make up for what is said to be more the fault of demon rum than an anti-Semitic demon in the soul of the Australian actor.

Some say that he has brought his career to a rubber-burning halt, and that he will just have to take the $350 million in profit from “The Passion of the Christ” and shove it up someplace where the sun doesn’t shine. Those who say this claim that the media are totally controlled by Jews and what they want goes and what they don’t want just disappears.

Those supposedly in the know were absolutely sure that Gibson had cooked his goose with an anti-Semitic film about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” It was destined to flop. It went on to become a blockbuster hit.

Perhaps Jews actually didn’t have the control of media that those in the know were sure that they had, or perhaps Hollywood had already created so many precedents for terribly convincing brutality and sadism that sadism with a solemnly brutal Christian message was a shoo-in.

My point is a simple one, which is that no amount of Jewish novelists, mass media entertainers, radio, television and film executives, public school and college teachers, broadcasters, investigative journalists and whatever else have changed the fundamental religious identity of the United States. What the worst Jews have done is whatever the worst of any other ethnic group have done — stolen, murdered, kidnapped and bilked. The essence of anti-Semitic bigotry is the same as any other bigotry in that the souls of the minority among Jews who are criminals are seen as emblematic and an explanation of behavior.

In the mind of the anti-Semite, those bad things were determined by the fact that the perpetrator is a Jew. Next case.

But what some of the most thoroughly influential Jews have done is open up our conversations about ethnic and religious identity, which makes us wonder what the Gibson flap tells us about ourselves as Americans.

I do not believe that Gibson, whether he is an anti-Semite or not, is connected to or speaks for any group violently opposed to Jews running or owning anything. That is not even close to a problem. Another Third Reich is not just around the corner.

Under the influence of drink Gibson probably just let slip what far too many Americans let slip when they think there are no Jews within hearing distance. In short, they express a social superstition much more accepted than we would like to admit. And superstition has always been, and always will be, the problem. I sincerely doubt apologies will change that.