The Lessons of Mel Gibson

I don't believe that it's all veritas in vino. I think the last thing people are likely to say while drunk is the truth. So I don't think Mel Gibson's crazy outburst ("Fucking Jews - the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world") is necessarily a genuine index of his feelings on the matter. But this doesn't help him, since he already seemed like an anti-semite anyway by virtue of his fabulously aerated, literal-minded, strangely possessive understanding of the death of [the] Christ. So, really, the only new information is that Mel will get blindly, viciously, career-endingly drunk on a quarter of a bottle of tequila. What a girl! What a big, anti-semitic girl!

If there isn't necessarily truth in wine there is definitely bigotry. Gibson's is a peculiarly far reach of prejudice (really, it isn't often that you'd hear quite such a laughable proposition - in regular life, you'd be more likely to hear a drunk go on about foreigners stealing all our jobs), but he's not a bad example of the general connection between alcohol and frothing chauvinism. There's an old joke about what makes the difference between a heterosexual man and a bisexual one, where the answer is "four pints". A friend of mine, concocting variations on this theme, posited that what made the difference between a Daily Mail reader and a Guardian reader was eight pints. God knows what you'd find to read after eight pints if you started out as a Daily Mail reader, but probably the world never need find out, since binge drinking is something only delinquents do. Nice people stop long before their driving is affected, let alone their moral compass.

Now, you could account for this in one of two ways. A pessimist would say that, since drinking lowers inhibitions, the increased level of belligerence towards the weak is a reflection of the authentic self. Everything else - all humanity, tolerance and understanding - is nothing more than the cosmetic sheen it pleases us to present when we have our inhibitions in place. An optimist would say that the booze-bigotry axis proves nothing more than benign rationalism could show at greater length - that chauvinism is not simply less pleasant but also less intelligent than tolerance. Nobody, after all, gets more intelligent when they're drunk; nobody gets more civilised, or more sophisticated; and nobody, apparently, gets more leftwing, or more liberal. It would be stretching it a bit to put these connections down to coincidence. It is much more likely that we on the left are simply cleverer.

Clearly, I support the second thesis. To ram home the truth of it, consider another curiosity. Rightwing commen-tators are often (unless they are talking about Churchill) complaining about and/or suspicious of alcohol, despite the fact that there is no obvious connection between grabby individualism and personal abstinence. It is not at all unusual to hear a rightwing polemicist rail against alcohol in the most bizarre circumstances: Melanie Phillips, for instance, berating George Best for his alcoholism while his corpse was still warm, or Tony Parsons, objecting not to drinkers but to female drinkers. (I big-heartedly reprint this for the few who might have missed it: "Why should a woman never get drunk? Because being drunk makes you loud, obnoxious, sentimental, self-pitying and stupid. And of course most women are like that when they are completely sober.")

You tend not to find people disavowing alcohol on the left, but booze holds a fear for rightwingers because they skate closer to bigotry - not necessarily anti-semitism, I must emphasise - in their sane minds than the rest of us. A stiff breezer might send them over the edge. None of this is meant to excuse Mel Gibson, more to use him as a cautionary tale: if you must spew bile while drunk, actual bile is a lot better than metaphorical, ideological bile.