Best Mel Gibson joke yet

When Mel screams "I am insane with anger," I always felt there was an eerie tinge of truth to the statement.

In all actuality, as funny as this video is, I think people are being too hard on Mel. I don't condone his beleifs or even his statements, but people need to own up to their own hate and xenophobia before they pin the problem on an A-list celebrity. It takes the focus off the issue itself and pointlessly sensationalizes it.

I believe Robert has hit on something. I worked retail for a couple years in college, 2001 was one of those years. Who knows what it was, whether the Older Lady (60's) had a son that died on the 11th or whether it was true Midwestern Patriotism, but one day a small 30-year-old Middle Eastern woman who worked under my supervision , was verbally assaulted while she stood behind the cash register. I didn't see it. If I had, I'd of said a thing or two in return. This woman I worked with, not even sure if she was the same ethnicity as the terrorists, though she was Muslim, was absolutely defeated. She wept for a good while after that. It made me very angry. And now I wonder if that same woman is condemning Mel Gibson for his hateful words. There a Bible verse about planks and specs and eyes that I think holds some water in situations like this. Though they should throw Mel in prison for awhile. Punishment is a necessary step in rehabilitation.

Celebs do become prisms through which we sometimes view larger issues -- that's why so many of them align themselves with political or charitable causes. I agree that the downside would be to focus so much on Mel Gibson that we lose sight of larger, more insidious forms of racism and xenophobia.

Mel's outburst was just made for fans of morality plays like "Crash" -- people who see racism as being primarily defined by what's put into words or overt actions, rather than the far more pervasive racism that is more subtly acted out unconsciously or semi-consciously. My opinion of Gibson hasn't changed -- I think he's no more or no less of a bigot now than I thought he was years ago. What I do think is disturbing, though, is that advertising and billboard companies are refusing to allow people to buy space to condemn what Gibson said and did. What happened to free speech?

Jim wrote:

What I do think is disturbing, though, is that advertising and billboard companies are refusing to allow people to buy space to condemn what Gibson said and did. What happened to free speech?

Jim, I'm not sure if that's really an issue of free speech is it? A magazine or a billboard company does reserve the right to refuse service, don't they? They're under no more obligation to publish and/or feature someone's hate-filled rants than they would be if I were to approach, say, The Hollywood Reporter and ask to buy space to publish two pages of written or photographic pornography. That's a simple issue of commerce, and something that were I such an entity, would likely be sensitive to as well.

All that said, this whole thing has gotta be one of the weirdest celeb stories of recent years - and what with Lance Bass coming out of the closet and all, that's saying something. (I certainly didn't see THAT coming.)

What this incident has hopefully done is show the masses that Mel is in fact human after all and prone to error and misguidance like the rest of us. I'm not sure if he's as of late been viewed as such by many, esp since the Jesus flick.

As I said to Ross in e-mail:

I agree with what you said about companies having the right to refuse certain kinds of advertising. I don't know what the specific content of the anti-Gibson billboards was. What bothers me is that these are billboard companies in LA, and if you can't criticize a big Hollywood power on hometown billboards, I find that disturbing. But perhaps the billboard companies would feel differently if the ads were coming from the ADL or the Simon Wiesenthal Center. I don't know.