I have a feeling the kind of people who tend to ignore and
excuse the anti-Semitic screeds coming out of Hezbollah will also
be the kind of people who regard every awful word Mel Gibson
said while plastered as a true expression of
what he really, secretly believes.
There is an overly large group of people out there willing to
look for nuance in the fanatically eliminationist rhetoric of
Iran’s President. His statements are never made under the influence
of alcohol, and yet his stone-cold sober rantings about the
destruction of Israel and his hints about nuclear weapons are
parsed away and ascribed to the particular nuances of his culture.
But Mel Gibson? Let’s all pretend we know exactly what he thinks
when he’s sober, based on the balderdash he roars with a bottle of
Tequila under his belt.
It bothers me when smart people who know better believe that
canard. After all, do our courts allow witnesses to offer their
solemn testimony while plowed? If one tells the whole truth and
nothing but the truth when snockered, then perhaps our courts ought
to require witnesses to demonstrate a sufficiently elevated BAC to
testify.
Alcohol is not a truth serum, of course; it just makes you
stupid (or more stupid) when taken to excess. There is no empirical
evidence that drunks are any more truthful than sober people. It’s
an old wives’ tale that alcohol opens a window on one’s soul. Alas,
it’s a tale some people would just love to believe. ADL National
Director Abe Foxman said:
It is unfortunate that it took an excess of booze and
an encounter with a traffic cop to reveal what was really in his
heart and mind.
We would hope that Hollywood now would realize the bigot in
their midst and that they will distance themselves from this
anti-Semite.
Maybe Mel Gibson is a closet Jew-hater, and maybe he isn’t. But
pretending to learn a person’s true character based on what he says
while drunk and handcuffed in the backseat of a police car is
absurd. Still, among those smart people ready to judge Gibson a
closet Nazi is Christopher Hitchens:
One does not abruptly decide, between the first and
second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after
all.
That is not my experience. During my last year in law school, I was
an intern prosecutor in Oklahoma . I dealt with hundreds of DUI
cases that year and tried a few. I read police reports about all
sorts of stops and found the behavior of the defendants varied
widely. The specific effects of drunkenness, beyond the most
clinical physiological ones, are just not predictable.
Some people get sleepy, some people get witty and funny and
loud, and some people get mean and even violent and take a swing at
a friend or a cop. Alcohol is a depressant that removes
inhibitions, and it makes people do things that they wouldn’t ever
consider doing when sober. Drunk people will attack friends or
family members whom they love. The “Girls Gone Wild” video series
is testament to the power of booze to prompt behavior in young
women that they might otherwise be ashamed of. And the phenomenon
of “beer goggles,” in which unattractive women appear more and more
attractive the more one drinks, has led many a man to do things he
wished he hadn’t.
Alcohol can even affect someone’s judgment to the point that
getting behind the wheel of a car while soused seems like a
perfectly reasonable idea. And while no one I know has ever
conjured up a Jew-baiting reverie like Mr. Gibson’s after a few
drinks, we all know people who have said something indiscreet,
offensive, or hurtful that they really, honest-to-God wish they had
left unsaid because they truly do not believe it.
YET LET’S ASSUME THAT MEL GIBSON really does, on some level, think
some of the things he said. There’s a larger question underneath
this controversy: let’s assume there does exist an “inhibited”
version of us, and also a chemically uninhibited version. Which one
is the “real” person, and which is the artifice? Most of us are
proud of our victories over our inner childishness; if I am in my
heart a glutton with a lust for fried okra, but I manage to curb
that impulse, enjoy okra in moderation, and drop ten pounds, that
might give me a small sense of accomplishment. But whose was the
victory? Am I the glutton, or am I the rational person who saw and
acted upon the need to control my gluttony?
As both a Christian and a conservative, I believe all men are
fallen and flawed. The institutions of civilization — Church,
family, the law, civil society — help us steer away from our
hearts’ jagged shoals. Each of us struggle with our own foibles,
and our much more sinister demons — the impulses or attitudes we
know to be wrong but cannot exorcise. But out of self-interested
careerism, out of love for our families, out of religious
obligation, or simply out of a fear of looking at ourselves in the
mirror if we fail, we learn, most of the time, to work around the
baser angels of our nature.
Then there is the alternative view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
perhaps the ultimate progenitor of modern leftism. “Rousseau first
made it fashionable,” a professor of mine once memorably lectured, “to despise one’s own culture.” Rousseau
believed that man’s true character manifests itself in a state of
nature — a pre-civilizational state. He wanted to get back to that
authentic, primitive expression of our true selves and rejected the
constraints and conventions of civilization as impediments to this
goal. Hence the modern left’s emphasis on the virtue of
“authenticity,” and on the need to escape from the cruel
expectations of society in order to liberate our true being.
While some inhibitions are damaging or irrational, most of them
are there for a reason. Our inhibitions are part of us and we
ignore them — and suppress them, chemically or otherwise — at
great peril. Me, I like my inhibitions. They’re part of me, and
they usually keep the rest of me out of trouble.
I’VE WANDERED FAR FROM that Santa Monica road where this essay
started, but ended up at a curiously political overlook of Gibson’s
troubles. If one tends to think that our truest selves emerge only
when our social inhibitions are removed, then one sees in Gibson’s
drunken self his true and unencumbered self. It is not surprising
that Christopher Hitchens, a man of the left, might jump to this
conclusion.
But if one tends to think that our true and higher self is
manifested in society, then one sees Gibson’s folly differently.
Gibson may, given his upbringing, harbor prejudices that he knows
are shameful and wrong. But he ordinarily pushes these evil
thoughts out of his mind (after all, it’s not like he has a long
track record of anti-Semitic statements) until one fateful evening
where alcohol breaks down the barriers he built against them.
Gibson said some truly ugly, awful things and this column is in
no way a defense of them. He deserves harsh criticism for his
irresponsibility and carelessness, not only in driving drunk and
endangering innocent bystanders, but in losing control of his
mouth. Either he got drunk and said something stupid that he really
never believed at all, or possibly he exposed a shameful part of
his soul that should have been cut out or at least quarantined far
away from the rest of his life.
Either way, his apology is only the tiniest step toward making
things right again. His colleagues in Hollywood and the press are
correct to demand he finally and unequivocally answers the
questions about his views — completely, and completely sober.
Let’s hope he will prove to us that his shame and contrition, not
his booze-addled bile, is a product of who he really is.
