Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“I read an article where they called my father, ‘sexy cop.’ It was embarrassing,” [Crowley's] daughter said as we sat down for cookies and Coke. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘He’s pretty cute.’ We laughed as Crowley’s wife rubbed her daughter’s back and reminded her son to mind the gift they had brought for the president.”

The lad gave Obama a Red Sox jersey, a suitable gift for any occasion. In other news, Ms. Gates, mind-reading like so many since this public sitcom began, scrutinized Crowley’s brood and opined, “This wasn’t a family raised on hate.” Professor Gates himself announced, “When he’s not arresting you, Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy.”

Back in Cambridge, Gates sent flowers to 911 caller Lucia Whalen, whose attorney told Greta van Susteren on Fox News that taking the obstreperous Harvard scholar into custody struck Whalen as justifiable. After getting trashed as a bigot on national television, Whalen herself turned out to be what academicians call “a person of color.” Oops.

In short, Gates, marveling about President Obama’s brilliant plan to get himself off the political hotplate by hosting the beer party (actually, Crowley suggested it), has walked the incident back as far as possible without explaining what combination of circumstances caused him to act so oddly on July 16. That, we’re evidently never going to get.

En route to the White House, Gates somewhat grandiosely told his daughter, “There are approximately 800,000 black men in prison, and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them.” Now he’s back at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, pedaling his custom-made 24-speed tricycle to the beach. And more power to him.

Certain members of Gates’ journalistic supporters urge a false-arrest suit. A prediction: That won’t happen, either. Only fools file impulsive lawsuits; the cost is prohibitive, the discovery process unpleasant.

Did Crowley maybe improve minor facts in his much-scrutinized report? Could be. Put it this way: If you’d seen a falling-down drunk skate on a DUI because a 3 a.m. police report called a dark-blue vehicle black (I have), you might edit creatively, too.

It ain’t right, but it’s the way of the world.

One can only hope that Edward Burns (“Sidewalks of New York,” “The Brothers McMullen”) has locked up the movie rights. Not only does Crowley look like his cousin, but wry social farce is what Burns does best. Alternatively, Spike Lee could have wicked fun with yet another racial comedy of errors.

Meanwhile, and here’s the thing, the incident cost the Obama White House almost two weeks in its efforts to pass medical-insurance reform, the most significant social legislation in a generation, while Americans entertained themselves screaming insults at one another.

“It is this vast and militant ignorance,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “this wide-spread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.” The Sage of Baltimore, as he was known, wrote long before the invention of 24/7 satellite news organizations and the Internet.

Here at the sprawling rural campus of Unsolicited Opinions Inc., the one-man, six-dog think tank where this column originates, we experienced a rare sorehead supernova. On the same day the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed a signed letter describing your humble, obedient servant here as a hater of Christians and an enemy of God for pointing out that Sarah Palin’s kind of a ditz, anonymous e-mails began to arrive from the professor’s supporters.

“Look you (bleep)ing racist moron,” one fellow suggested, “die in your (bleep)hole called Arkansas.” Someone posting at Salon.com took a similar tack. “You really this ignorant?” one fellow asked. “Or just an ignorant, right-wing, crazy, motherfrolickin’ bastard? KMA Mr. Lyons. Your Southern bias is too lacking in intelligence to bother with a response. This time you have truly revealed your Arkansas roots.”

Not much of a conversation-starter, would you say? As a New Jersey native, where scatological insult’s an art form, I’ve rarely lost a name-calling contest.

But why bother? Argument’s one thing. I thrive on it. But this imbecilic contumely, much encouraged by Internet anonymity, appears to be dividing the nation into feuding cultural tribes too busy feeling sorry for themselves and shrieking insults to comprehend the nation’s gravest problems, much less to solve them.

Oh, and another thing: Woo Pig, Sooie!

Alas, the average professor can be awfully hard to bring down off his high horse. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was just back from a trip to China. So he probably hadn’t heard a story that moved on the wires that morning about five Jersey City cops gunned down by a perp who’d hidden a shotgun under his bathrobe. One died, along with the shooter and his girlfriend.

Chances are that Crowley, who answered a possible burglary-in-progress call at Gates’ home in Cambridge, Mass., that afternoon, knew about it. Cops notice stories like the Jersey City shooting. They’re a reminder that even small, seemingly inoffensive fellows can shoot you graveyard dead.

“We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind,” concedes New York Times columnist Judith Warner. “But his report and later statements seem to attest to a greatly outsized sense of vulnerability and victimization.”

Where do they find them, I wonder? Whether Crowley knew about the Jersey City incident, he was alone and responding to a 911 call of a possible crime in progress. There had been recent burglaries in that area. The woman who reported it met him outside. She’d seen two men break in the front door and enter the house.

So, yeah, of course Crowley asked Gates to step outside. He didn’t know who was inside, or what was going on. Fictionalizing, Warner surmises that even a white man might have “bristled at the cold officiousness of the officer’s tone.”

Here’s how Gates described the incident to his own magazine, the Root. Having forced a jammed lock, he was on the phone with Harvard University. “I’m saying, ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said, ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’… All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’

“My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’”

Three things: Gates needs new lawyers. Second, no he wasn’t in danger, as subsequent events proved. Third, assuming sobriety, why would somebody who’d just broken his door open in broad daylight find it “strange” and “ridiculous” that a cop would ask him to explain?

Mind-reading like many in the (forgive me) liberal media, Gates even supplied Sgt. Crowley with a motive. “It’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.”

Nothing about Crowley’s fine record makes that credible. On CNN, Gates waxed indignant that the officer followed him inside without being asked. It’s called “probable cause.” He’s not going to let a suspect out of his sight until he’s satisfied there’s an innocent explanation. At which point Gates apparently began yelling about racism. He says Crowley refused to identify himself; Crowley says he did, but the professor wouldn’t shut up long enough to hear him.

Was it necessary to arrest Gates? Well, it’s not a crime to act like a jackass, but cops can’t have crowds seeing them cowered by a loudmouth. Everybody with any sense understands about black men and white cops. But racism’s a two-way street. Being a Harvard professor ought to imply a degree of self-control. Had he not acted, yes, so “stupidly,” Gates could have avoided embarrassment.

Meanwhile, President Obama should learn to finesse touchy questions when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association