A rogue wave at sea is a monstrous and potentially life threatening phenomenon. In a sea which is otherwise rough but manageable, a rogue wave is the mutually reinforcing combination of several much smaller waves resulting in a fleeting mountain.
As a metaphor, the rogue wave explains quite well the mountain of indignation in Cambridge last week.
The constituent waves were, taken by themselves, relatively minor: contempt of cop, “Do you know who I am?”, and racism all combined to make a mountain of a molehill.
I’ll let Mark Steyn do the heavy lifting in defense of my theorem:
He Said/V.I.P. Said
A Prejudometer cranked up to eleven.
By Mark Steyn
National Review OnlineBy common consent, the most memorable moment of Barack Obama’s otherwise listless press conference on “health care” were his robust remarks on the “racist” incident involving Prof. Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police. The latter “acted stupidly,” pronounced the chief of state. The president of the United States may be reluctant to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to the plate and speak truth to power. And thank God the leader of the free world had the guts to stand up and speak truth to municipal police sergeant James Crowley.
For everyone other than the president, what happened at Professor Gates’s house is not entirely clear. The Harvard prof returned home without his keys and, as Obama put it, “jimmied his way into the house.” Someone witnessing the “break-in” called the cops, and things, ah, escalated from there. Professor Gates is now saying that, if Sergeant Crowley publicly apologizes for his racism, the prof will graciously agree to “educate him about the history of racism in America.” Which is a helluva deal. I mean, Ivy League parents re-mortgage their homes to pay Gates for the privilege of lecturing their kids, and here he is offering to hector it away to some no-name lunkhead for free.
Ah, thick chewey Irony! The party who began the conversation with an accusation of racism (“Why? Because I’m a black man in America?”) supported only by his own prejudices offers to harangue the party he so accused!
Worse is that the man elected to be the President of the United States (not just some sections of the United States and most certainly not just some identifiable sub sets of the group “citizens of the United States”) seems to be incapable of controlling the spasms of his lower leg when the cry of “racism” goes up, regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of the case.
More after the break…
…continued
Mr. Steyn continues:
As to the differences between the professor’s and the cops’ version of events, I confess I’ve been wary of taking Henry Louis Gates at his word ever since, almost two decades back, the literary scholar compared the lyrics of the rap group 2 Live Crew to those of the Bard of Avon. “It’s like Shakespeare’s ‘My love is like a red, red rose,’ ” he declared, authoritatively, to a court in Fort Lauderdale.
As it happens, “My luv’s like a red, red rose” was written by Robbie Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. Sixteenth-century English playwright, 18th-century Scottish poet: What’s the diff? Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates’s testimony was boorish enough to point out the misattribution.
Ah, yet another sterling example of the modern academy, but we digress…
I hasten to add I have nothing against the great man. He’s always struck me as one of those faintly absurd figures in which the American academy appears to specialize, but relatively harmless by overall standards. And I certainly sympathize with the general proposition that not all encounters with the constabulary go as agreeably as one might wish. Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a “liar.” I considered my options:
Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission, and possibly shot while “resisting arrest”;
Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law-enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.
I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving “supervisory performance-related issue-counseling,” which, with any luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still ongoing.
Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid. For one thing, these days they have dash-cams and two-way radios and a GPS gizmo in the sharp end of the billy club, so an awful lot of this stuff winds up being preserved on tape, and, if you’re the one a-hootin’ an’ a-hollerin’, it’s not going to help.
Indeed not. This is one of the reasons I hope this matter does indeed go to court. I for one would like to hear the complete and un-redacted tapes of the various 911 calls and radio communications in the matter. Modern technology will have little difficulty in picking out the background shouting.
In the Sixties, the great English satirist Peter Simple invented the Prejudometer, which simply by being pointed at any individual could calculate degrees of racism to the nearest prejudon, “the internationally recognized scientific unit of racial prejudice.” Professor Gates seems to go around with his Prejudometer permanently cranked up to eleven: When Sergeant Crowley announced through the glass-paneled front door that he was here to investigate a break-in, Gates opened it up and roared back: “Why? Because I’m a black man in America?”
The record, as it currently exists, clearly indicates both prejudice and racism. Equally clearly, the perpetrators are Gates and Obama.
Isn’t it interesting what our national discussion on race is revealing?
Read the whole of Steyn’s article, it’s well worth it.
I bookmarked this site, Thank you for good job!
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