Then, why do our courts not allow witnesses to offer their solemn testimony while plowed? If one tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth when snockered, then perhaps our courts ought to require witnesses to demonstrate a sufficiently elevated BAC to testify. The specific effects of drunkenness, beyond the most clinical physiological ones, are just not predictable. Some people get sleepy, some people get witty and funny and loud, and some people get mean and even violent and take a swing at a friend or a cop. Alcohol is a depressant that removes inhibitions, and it makes people do things that they wouldn't ever consider doing when sober. Alcohol can even affect someone's judgment to the point that getting behind the wheel of a car while soused seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. And while no one I know has ever conjured up a Jew-baiting reverie like Mr. Gibson's after a few drinks, we all know people who have said something indiscreet, offensive, or hurtful that they really, honest-to-God wish they had left unsaid because they truly do not believe it. Yet let's assume that Mel Gibson really does, on some level, think some of the things he said. There's a larger question underneath this controversy: let's assume there does exist an "inhibited" version of us, and also a chemically uninhibited version. Which one is the "real" person, and which is the artifice?
If one tends to think that our truest selves emerge only when our social inhibitions are removed, then one sees in Mr. Gibson's drunken self his true and unencumbered self.
But if one tends to think that our true and higher self is manifested in society, then one sees Gibson's folly differently.
Contd.