Sir Gnome Says:
July 22, 2009 at 12:59 am
Its not illegal to yell at a cop. It just isnt. True, it may not be smart
. But its not illegal.
thus begging the assertion that one *should* be disorderly toward police officers, in full view of the fact that the safe decorum for doing so is secured by the very person youre yelling at?
The worst part of this whole incident is 1) the inevitable snowball effect of an incident for which there is incredibly limited circumstantial evidence, and yet for which all seem perfectly willing to assert a priori conditions of racial inequality 2) the ineptness of the gown class in interpreting and dealing with heated situations without the egomaniacal inclination toward enlarging said situations into grand-scheme historical narratives.
The facts are, a hapless police officer responded to a call in a manner befitting the rote protocols of his/her duties. However wrongly or not in hindsight, he was leaning on the rote schemas of law enforcement, and Gates knew this. And any person with a scintilla of experience in the material social conditions that the rest of us face knows that disorderly conduct charges are a frequent hazard, highly subjective by definition, and thus a common tool used by police officers to remove recalcitrant actors from excited situations.
As a professional, Gates absolutely failed in his professional obligation to account for the officers understanding of such a situation, and to communicate a resolution. All of the commentary out there tends to imply that there were no such alternatives, but instead that such an isolated an easily-averted incident are the tentacles of institutional racism, the Milgram-effect of preening cops with too much power who will take away your skateboards and spray cans and poison your kittens and cancel recess. Its the excluded middle sandwich: all bread and impossible to swallow.
I just cant believe how aptly we impose this cultural logic of race, inequality, and pop-liberalism on such particular incidents, which began when everyone fecklessly presumed the officer was white, seemingly because it fit the narrative symmetry of the cultural logic at hand. Friggin embarrassing. Its the B-level stuff of the Scary Movie comedies.
Gotta correct you here.The sad thing is that most politicians in the City of Cambridge and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts *agree* with and *support* the "professor" in this case.I hope you don't think that Hussein is the only "progressive" out there who wants the cop in question fired...all cops in Cambridge to undergo "sensitivity training"...and the City of Cambridge to pay the "professor" millions.