COMMENTARY: Mel Gibson’s Scarlet Letter: `S’ for Sinner

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) “Alcohol,” my mother used to quote from an old Irish saying, “takes the varnish off everything.” And so it did for actor/director Mel Gibson when he uttered what he himself describes as “despicable” slurs about the Jewish people after police pulled him over for drunken driving in Malibu, Calif. […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “Alcohol,” my mother used to quote from an old Irish saying, “takes the varnish off everything.”

And so it did for actor/director Mel Gibson when he uttered what he himself describes as “despicable” slurs about the Jewish people after police pulled him over for drunken driving in Malibu, Calif.


For some reason, Gibson’s fall from superstar grace has not been washed pure in the tsunami of sympathy that usually flows over movie and rock stars following infidelity, ransacking hotel rooms or ingesting the Hollywood smoothie of cocaine and alcohol.

Maybe Gibson’s mistake is in so forthrightly acknowledging his fault, confessing it unconditionally, and proposing to make up for it by seeking treatment for his alcoholism and help from the Jewish community. Who does this guy think he is?

This may be entirely too confrontational for a modern America that denies sin, enjoys scandal and treats bad-behavior-induced sadness as an unfair chemical imbalance to be righted with Prozac. This is a place, after all, that seems to live by the impossible “Love Story” sentiment that love means never having to say you are sorry.

When something goes wrong, public figures say, “I take responsibility for this” but never say, “I take the blame.” Bill Clinton, for example, acts as if he were still waiting for us to apologize to him for causing him so much grief over his own misbehaviors. That he is known for “sucking all the air out of the room” describes his I-never-did-anything-wrong style and his still undiminished need for our applause as his absolution.

Maybe the old pol was talking about America in general when he said “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” How fitting that Randy Cohen, writer of an ethics column for the New York Times Magazine, prepared for this assignment by previously writing one-liners for Rosie O’Donnell and David Letterman.

This reluctance to recognize the moral weight of our actions is also found in the incomplete sentences that many Americans accept as their moral slogans. These include: “A woman’s right to choose” without defining the object of choice; “The public’s right to know” without explaining the object of knowledge; and the imperative “Move on” without naming a destination or knowing how to get there.

The rejection of the terms necessary in any true moral dialogue reaches its zenith in the currently fashionable “if you were offended” style of apology that is less an apology and more a shift of guilt to the offended persons.


Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin used it last year in trying to redeem himself for seeming to compare American troops with fascistic armies. He apologized to those who took offense at his words. Translation: My real regret is that some of you are so thin-skinned and/or dumb that you misinterpreted my earlier statements.

This is a classic example of how the notions supplied by the Advertising/Public Relations Industrial Complex empty American life of meaning. It’s like a pickpocket so skilled that we don’t feel the loss when it occurs.

At least Gibson seems to know that real love means having to say we are sorry all the time, loudly and clearly enough so that the people we have hurt can hear it. Gibson sees the moral issues in his behavior, and has confessed them without the sweet-sounding denial that characterizes the “if you were offended” apology game that passes for contrition these days.

Maybe some people in Hollywood and elsewhere withhold their support because they don’t know how to deal or what to do with a man who tells the truth. Gibson has done a remarkable and countercultural thing. He has called anti-Semitism a sin and acknowledged that he is a sinner.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY

To find a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by last name.


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