Christopher Noxon on Mel Gibson (and his dad)

Christopher Noxon, author of Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up has posted his take on Mel Gibson, based on writing a New York Times Magazine feature about The Passion of the Christ and interviewing Mel's dad, Hutton. It's a must-read. Especially the whole Holocaust denying thing. And 9/11 passenger list being forged.

I’m hesitant to play along with the mass schadenfreude now fueling the unfolding psychodrama, but a few points seem to have been lost in the current frenzy. The most important of which is this: Mel and his father are not Catholics. While his handlers have expertly positioned Mel as a hero for red state churchgoers, traditionalism is an outright rejection of any deviation from the strict Catholic liturgy. To many traditionalists, the Catholic Church is nothing less than a hive of idolatry and the fount of a worldwide conspiracy in which the Jews play a prominent and nefarious part.

These sentiments are clearly echoed in Mel’s D.U.I. encounter with the cops. As hard as his defenders try to write the episode off as a drunken rant, Mel’s rantings weren’t plucked from thin air. They’re regurgitations of words Hutton Gibson uttered lo those many moons ago in Houston: “The deliberately trashed our faith,” he told me. “What they did to the mass is pure evil. This couldn’t have happened by accident. It was a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.”