Mel Gibson as Metaphor for What Ails America

OK. Here's my guilty summer confession: I can't get enough of the Mel Gibson scandal.

Let me preface this post by saying that I'm hardly one for celebrity gossip. I have no idea who Justin Bieber is. I don't care whether Jennifer Aniston wants kids or not. And despite former Politics Daily colleague Emily Miller's compelling argument for why we should all be taking The National Enquirer more seriously, I can't stomach tabloids.

Still, when it comes to the ongoing Mel Gibson saga, I can't look away. And I suspect I'm not alone. And that's because Gibson embodies a whole bunch of different ills plaguing America right now, which we're trying, as a nation, to figure out. And as we do that, Gibson provides a convenient foil for examining our worst fears about ourselves as a country. To wit:

1. Mel as racist. In case you haven't been following all the twists and turns in the actor's ongoing meltdown, the most recent controversy surrounds a series of taped conversations he allegedly had with former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Radar Online published excerpts of those conversations -- in which someone who sounds like Gibson hurls all sorts of insults at Grigorieva, including telling her that if she gets "raped by a pack of n***ers," it will be her fault. I'm not suggesting that most of America is anywhere near as racist as Mel Gibson. But as my colleague Mary C. Curtis pointed out in the wake of the Shirley Sherrod controversy last week, racial resentment still simmers just below the surface in this country, spoken or not. And it remains an enduring feature of electoral politics, as my colleague Eleanor Clift observed. Gibson's racist rants may make our stomachs churn, but by saying them out loud he is forcing us to stare that reality in the face.

2. Mel as anti-Semite. Before he became famous for being a racist, Gibson was better known as an anti-Semite. In 2006, the film star was arrested for drunken driving in California and made anti-Semitic comments to a Jewish police officer. Once again, his tirade was so out of bounds that -- Oliver Stone notwithstanding -- it would be easy to dismiss it as a drunken rant. But, like racism, anti-Semitism is another minefield where Americans are anything but "post-." Just think back to longtime White House correspondent and columnist Helen Thomas espousing her views that Jews "should get the hell out of Palestine." Whether or not you think Thomas really is anti-Semitic -- or just the victim of a political environment in which you aren't allowed to criticize Israel -- the explosiveness of that controversy showed just how raw a wound the Holocaust remains in our national consciousness. It also showed that, at least where criticizing Israel is concerned, we're a long way from having that conversation civilly.

3. Mel as crazy Catholic. Gibson isn't actually Catholic, although many people think he is. Like his father, he adheres to something called Sedevacantism. Sedevacantists hold that the popes from the latter half of the 20th century are heretics for having introduced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including abandoning the celebration of the Mass in Latin. But even if he's only a pseudo-Catholic, his fringe-y traditionalist views are very often lumped in with all that's wrong with Catholicism. In a country that's very publicly trying to figure out how to cope with an institution whose hierarchy seems so divorced from the modern world (most recently, equating the ordination of female priests as a crime on par with pedophilia), I dare say that Mel isn't helping to give this religion a good name.

4. Mel as wife beater. This is probably the angle on Mel that gets the least attention in the media, as Zerlina Maxwell noted recently in Salon. As she points out, the reason Grigorieva was recording Gibson in the first place was that she needed proof that he was abusive to her not only emotionally but physically. And she's far from alone. In 2010, just in the United States, 3 million women will suffer domestic abuse. Worldwide, at least one in three women will either be physically or sexually abused in her lifetime. It's easy to paint people like Gibson (or Charlie Sheen) as psychotic outliers on the domestic abuse spectrum, who warrant interest for the extreme nature of their crimes. (Gibson allegedly knocked Grigorieva's teeth out; Sheen pulled a knife on his wife.) But the numbers suggest that the reason we stare is because these guys are actually living right next door.

5. Mel as alcoholic. Many Americans are terrified of alcohol and have tremendous anxiety around it. (Trust me. I live in a country -- England -- where drinking a bottle of wine by yourself in one evening is not considered excessive.) Mel is the dark side of alcoholism -- the scary, swaggering, risk-seeking side that we middle-aged Americans purport to condemn, even while more and more of us are binge drinking. But Americans also love a redemption story, particularly when it concerns overcoming a vice like alcohol (cue former President George W. Bush).

Some pundits are now predicting that Gibson's career is over. His agents have already dropped him. But I think that if he were to genuinely repent -- i.e., go on the wagon and stop spewing bile towards any or all of the races, genders and ethnicities he's offended in the past -- Americans would actually be able to forgive his many transgressions.

After all, we need to. Because his sins are our own sins, and we need to feel better about ourselves. What could be more American than that?

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