Shaking ... with Excitement

Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard has hit the jackpot. He has won the lotto. He's got the world in his hands, he is set for life. His freakout with the police officers will be relived in his classroom, where he teaches all about racial injustice, for the rest of his career.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,'' the report said.

Gates told the officer that he was being targeted because "I'm a black man in America.''

Could there have been anything more harmlessly delicious than this for him? The cops who arrested him were of mixed races and the white one who did the deed teaches anti-racial profiling classes to the police force and was hired by a black man who has vouched for his utter lack of racism.

And yet Professor Gates, tenured Harvard Professor, has been made into a national symbol of America's inability to let go of slavery, another switch to flog us with for having thought, well, anything at all.

It's wonderful.

The best line in the article linked above was this one.

Counter, who had called Gates from the Nobel Institute in Sweden, where Counter is on sabbatical, said that Gates was “shaken” and “horrified” by his arrest.

I'll bet he was shaking. It was the sort of shaking you do after you scratch off the last winning number on a Lotto ticket.

YAHTZEEEEEEEE!