Silly man – pathetic, even. There isn’t an ounce of reason in what Gibson said, but then, who could expect there to be? Well, the entire Western world, apparently, which imagines that what a drunk Catholic actor says in the extremity of his cups might represent a threat to civilisation.  ~Andrew O’Hagan, The Daily Telegraph

Via Andrew Sullivan (who has now added ‘anti-Semitic’ to his repertoire of dismissive adjectives for things he doesn’t agree with, regardless of content, along with Christianist and theocon)

This point is part of what I was trying to get at with this post.  Of course, the media frenzy is predictable–anytime a celebrity does anything scandalous or out of the ordinary, there will be such a frenzy to feed our cult of celebrity–but for many people the wider preoccupation with solemnly condemning Gibson has all of the hallmarks of payback for the success of The Passion, which they desperately wanted to see fail, or of a crowd fleeing in terror from the leper, as if they would be infected by the same leprosy if they did not run from him as fast as they could.   

But here’s a question for you: if it was wrong to blacklist all those poor screenwriters and actors for their communism (in fact, many of them just changed their names and kept working that way), when their communist affinities placed them in sympathy with the greatest, mass-murdering ideology of all time, will it also be wrong to blacklist Gibson because of his outburst?  Or are there good blacklists?  Quick, get George Clooney on the case!