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…