Let me start by saying that I think Sgt. James Crowley is an cowardly and arrogant ass, hiding behind the skirts of his boss and his union, unwilling to admit that he made a mistake in the way he handled the now-infamous arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates.
I’ve known one other Crowley, a woman with a gigantic ego so easily bruised that she was offended when my department failed to give her credit for a minor suggestion she offered around an equally minor point of discussion.
Another anecdote before I get to the point: a few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with some local residents. The meeting leader, a young man who I’d guess is in his mid-late 20’s, self-righteously declared that he couldn’t stand people who complain about Cape Cod. “If they don’t like it here, why don’t they leave?”
Never mind the fact that the Cape, for all its charm and physical beauty, has some of the worst social problems in the state, and that some of us with kids and grandkids who are growing up in this area feel we have a responsibility to leave a better legacy to them than the one that exists today.
This smug young man’s last name isn’t Crowley, but it’s of a similar ethnicity. And his attitude, that criticism is a betrayal of – something – is an all-too common one in Eastern Massachusetts, along with a pathological fear of authority, a mountain of self-imposed guilt and hair-trigger indignation over imagined slights.
You may recall the scandalous abuses in the Boston Archdiocese which, as one local commentator named Eagan noted “seem to involve a lot of Irish priests – what’s that about?”
You may also recall the film “The Magdalene Sisters” and the recent revelations of scandalous, stomach-turning abuse of helpless children in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses run by the Catholic Church in Ireland.
My point in all this is to say that if the policeman called to Professor Gates’ home had been an officer Cohen, MacGregor or Li, we’d be a lot less likely to be in the middle of a national uproar about racial profiling.
How does one explain this profound malady of the soul that seems to infect an entire ethnic group, both here and overseas?
I certainly can’t, but one thing I know for sure: as columnist Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote this morning,
It wasn’t that (the police) were all bad, but you never wanted to have to find out which ones were. As my mother would say, they were to be “fed with a long-handled spoon.”
For that reason, after years of trying without success to “get along”, and even though my grandfather, a Scotsman, emigrated to this country from County Cavan, I tend to approach neighborhoods displaying the tricolor and bars with Gaelic names with a long-handled spoon.
And even though their truth is degrees different from mine, I totally respect Professor Gates and afterwards, President Obama, for not being afraid to speak the truth: that Crowley acted “stupidly” in that particular situation.
Good for them.