Deconstructing Mel Gibson

Those of us on the right like heroes.  Not victims, who are enshrined by the left. They prefer helpless martyrs for the most part.  We like John Wayne characters — able, resourceful people who know right from wrong and take sides readily.  I'm a bit of a dissenter from the John Wayne cult myself, preferring Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart as symbols of the ideal American type, but that's just me.  Anyhow, we like historical heros and adopt them as our avatars, so to speak.  We almost elevate heroes like Crockett and Lindbergh over the Jeffersons and Paines.  And we like the Mel Gibson heroes.  We need heroes, you see, and we're inspired by that tenacious Indian in Apocalypto, by William Wallace who was even more pig-headedly tenacious in Braveheart, and by the slow-to-anger-but-run-like-hell-when-he-finally-gets-there Benjamin Martin in The Patriot.  In these times, when Obama is arranging the collapse of civilization as fast as possible, we're even inspired by Mad Max.  Now we're wondering how his "Judah Maccabee" project will turn out.

And since we're inspired by Mel Gibson heroes, we're sort of inspired by Mel Gibson himself, and expect a lot of him.  A lot of us liked his in-vino-veritas performance when stopped by the cop, and even those of us who aren't conservative Catholics at least admire his dedication to his faith.  So a lot of us have been hoping Gibson would turn out to be a celebrity-politician we could coalesce around for a political renaissance.  My friend Baloo is even selling this bumper sticker.

But are we expecting too much?  Libertarians have often gotten all excited about self-proclaimed libertarian  celebrities like Howard Stern and Drew Carey, only to find out that they really are just preening themselves and don't really have any convictions, and that their dedication to the principles we believe in are shallow at best.

Kevin MacDonald has been studying the Mel Gibson phenomenon and comes to these conclusions.