Will Mel Gibson be forgiven? That seems to be the question the media is asking nowadays. Mel's incident is very different from a lot of other celebrity incidents. It's not the Hugh Grant-caught-with-his-pants down situation that produced chuckles across the nation. It's not the Halle Berry incident in which she fled the scene of an accident. In those cases, there were judgments and actions involved that could be characterized as stupid or simply "what the hell were they thinking??" The Mel incident is different in that he seemed to have given the public a glimpse into his innermost thoughts and soul, letting his true colors reveal while drunk. He is certifiably a bigot, & how do you recover from that?

How Mel does in Hollywood in the future will be a test of how powerful PR can be. I often think that the Hollywood PR machine is much more powerful than anyone can imagine. Tom Cruise is a good example. When he was married to Nicole Kidman, many people (including myself) thought that the marriage was a PR ruse to hide his secret life of homosexuality. But they adopted kids together! If it was a PR set up, it was something on a different scale if it had to involve lives of these children who were adopted by them! On Saturday Night Live right around their divorce, Tina Fey commented that "the kids may now be returned to the prop department," which made me laugh, but I wonder if those kids were used as PR props. If they can do that, they can do a lot of different things.

Mel's future in Hollywood will be interesting to watch as it will reflect what the publicity machine is capable of doing. In the NY Times today, a rabbi comments that "anti-Semitism can't be cured 'through a press release.'" But maybe the public can be deluded into thinking so.