Sunday, July 18, 2010

Recurring Theme Number Six: Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude--taking pleasure in the sufferings of others--has been a running theme in this blog.  Hey, I am just more honest about it.  Frank Rich positively revels in it as he considers the demise of Mel Gibson and ties it to the decline of the religious right.  Given that Mel Gibson made the ultimate schadenfreude movie--Passion of the Christ, this is perhaps nicely ironic.  I am not sure that we are better off that the Tea Party has replaced the religious right, if that is indeed the case.  Of course, we will only be able to evaluate that down the road.  But I must say I did enjoy Rich's list of fallen holier-than-thou hypocrites.

Perhaps a little schadenfreude is good for brunch.

1 comment:

Tony Kondaks said...

Frank Rich wrote:

"Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism."

Gibson's popularity rose amongst Christians as a result of his movie "The Passion of the Christ" was certainly amongst conservatives but also amongst liberel and leftist Christians as well.

Indeed, there is much in Gibson's life to suggest he is himself a liberal:

1) Gibson appeared in "Who killed the electric car?" as one of the elite lessors of the all-electric EV1. That's an ultra-liberal thing to do.

2) His father took Mel and his brothers out of the US in the '60s precisely because he didn't want them drafted into the Vietnam War.

Jimmy Carter and Martin Sheen are both heavy-duty Christians who are radically against abortion (Carter is and was more anti-abortion than any Republican president of the past 40 years). Yet both Carter and Sheen are still acknowledged as liberals. Gibson is much closer to these folks than he is to, say, the tea partiers.