I would also like to concur wholeheartedly with Diogenes’ excellent post.
I attended a Catholic university that was overwhelmingly conservative in its politics (students and faculty alike). Even in this environment, instances of Hutton Gibson-esque anti-semitism were rare and sure to provoke near universal howls of outrage. There was a small clique of students who were prone to expressing opinions of this kind, and their members were regarded as near pariah by most other students. Invariably, these were kids from strictly traditionalitic families, most of whom rejected (to a varying degree) the reforms of Vatican II and longed for the “good old days” of papal theocracy. The good news is that a) some of these kids wised up; and b) those who didn’t were often too socially inhibited to have much chance of reproducing. The bad news is that some of those who persisted in their small-mindedness did come across suitably reactionary mates, and they tend to follow the old fashioned Catholic model of having lots and lots of kids.
Another facet of this whole incident that hits home for me is alcoholism. My university seemed to produce more than its fair share of serious alcoholics. Sure, there were plenty of kids who were new to drinking and took a while to learn their limits. There were plenty of others who managed to drink socially – even to the occasional excess – without suffering (or causing) any serious harm. But there were cases when I watched in disgust as kind, thoughtful, intelligent people devolved into shades of their former selves. And not always in the same way. I’ve come across violent drunks, catatonic drunks, infantile drunks, horny drunks, and destructive drunks. I’ve seen great kids with everything going for them in life throw it all away because they couldn’t crawl out of the bottle long enough to go to class. I’ve had friends who were raped while drunk, by students who were also drunk. I witnessed two friends who had never had a single disagreement between them come close to killing one another while drinking in their dorm room one evening.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not an expert on alcoholism, nor do I advocate a return to Prohibition. What I’m saying is that alcohol affects different people in different ways, and can be wildly unpredictable. Which is one of the reasons that I don’t drink at all. I’m not very good as resisting temptation, and don’t want to find out whether or not I’d enjoy being drunk. As far as Mel Gibson goes, I feel that anyone who gives a blanket statement of “in vino veritas” or “he wasn’t that drunk” is grossly unaware of (or choosing to ignore) the vast spectrum of human responses to alcoholic stimulation.
This is not an apology for Mel Gibson. I am not defending him. Maybe he is a hardcore Jew-hating bigot. But maybe he isn’t. And here’s my main point: unless you know the guy personally and can testify as to how he has historically behaved while under the influence, I contend that you have no real insight into how much the words spoken in a drunken rant reflect the “real” person.