About two minutes ago I finished my second listening to the Mel Gibson rant posted today by RadarOnline. Wow!
Not what I expected. First off, he sounds sober. Second, he sounds volcanically angry, and jealous to the point of obsession. The two minute and two second clip starts off with Mel chiding girlfriend Oksana about her breast implants, saying they look "f---ing ridiculous," and saying she looks like a "Vegas whore."
Oksana's perceived provocative dress seems to be the bee in Mel's bonnet. His obvious rage has a chilling, almost O.J. quality to it. The old "If I can't have you, nobody will!" feel.
And then there's the "N" word, otherwise known as the secret password to oblivion for rich famous white guys with bad judgment. Mel lets it fly as he expounds on Oksana's provocative dress saying "If you get raped by a pack of n---ers it will be your fault."
I gotta admit I misjudged this thing. For a week or two now this tape has been quoted in various web sites but the actual audio was unavailable. My gut said that Mel is probably a mean drunk. His DUI rant against Jews during his 2006 arrest certainly pointed in that direction. So when the Oksana tape excerpts started leaking out, in print form only, I assumed Mel was most likely tanked when he made those call. As in, how about I knock off a twelve pack and call that b-tch and give her a piece of my mind. Not the case. As stated earlier, Mel sounds stone cold sober, not to mention uber-pissed.
Oksana, on the other hand, sounds calm and reasonable, but, of course, she knew she was taping the conversation.
Was my effort to paint Mel as a garden variety bad drunk a subliminal way to give him a pass? Might I be conflicted about my own anger and feelings toward women and minorities? No! And Screw you for suggesting it!
Mel's sobriety does complicate things though. Now there is no denying that Mel Gibson has some very ugly stuff in him. Then you think, holy crap, what did his wife of 28 years and his 7 kids have to put up with? Odds are, this is old hat to them.
The airing of Mel's tape comes atop an avalanche of male human wreckage -- Tiger Woods, Al Gore, Chris Brown. We live in an age in which celebrities are under almost microscopic scrutiny. And we're finding out the hard way that most people are like sausages, in that, you don't want to see what's inside them.You can bet that Clark Gable and Frank Sinatra dropped a few "N" words in their time but nobody recorded it and TMZ did not exist.
Now we get to see our stars eating burgers off the floor and we get to hear their nastiest breakup phone calls. Thank God we never had to hear John Wayne say to some ex-girlfriend, "Now look here you little skank!..."
The question is, what the hell does Mel do now? Is anyone really going to buy some photo op with Al Sharpton? Or the head of the Association of Vegas Whores, for that matter. In fact, doesn't this make Mel's earlier apologies for his anti-Semitic rant seem a tad hollow? And isn't there a weird feeling that Mel has yet to hit bottom? That maybe he's capable of something truly scummy?
Yes, he still has a few hundred million dollars worth of insulation, and he's not quite Joran Vandersloot, but the cold light of dawn is revealing the man that is Mel Gibson, and that man appears to be a douche bag.
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As a staunch supporter of the NAACP for his entire adult life, it's a decent bet that Sinatra tossed around fewer "N words" than most mid-20th century whites. Beginning in the early 1940s, he was speaking against racial intolerance, and put his money where his mouth was, and for his trouble he got a fat FBI file calling him a communist.
As for Gable, here's an excerpt from hellonegro.com:
Clark Gable almost stalked off the set of “Gone With the Wind” when he discovered studio bathrooms were designated “White” and “Colored.”
In an excerpt published by the New York Post of “Victor Fleming,” a biography about the film’s director, writer Michael Sragow says Gable “got on the phone to Fleming, who called the prop master and told him, ‘If you don’t get those signs down, you won’t get your Rhett Butler.’ “
The signs were taken down immediately.
I wish people would think and do a little homework before they write. The author carelessly chose the wrong two dead white guys to use as his example.
Punching his girlfriend in the face doesn't count as "truly scummy"? Really?
True. But the reason Mel's and Chris Brown's behavior is so shocking is that it goes FAR beyond what most people say or do even in their private lives. You can put me under whatever scrutiny you want, you're not going to find me biting and punching my girlfriend, or wishing that my girlfriend gets raped.