Vic Socotra

24 July 2009

Restraint

I was not going to get sucked into the controversy about Dr. Gates. It would be tempting, like it sucked in the President. I was going to talk about the designer of the Bulava rocket system who was forced to tender his resignation after the latest failure, and the fact that low oil prices appear to have the Russian Navy well on the way to a fire sale and bankruptcy.

It is unfortunate that I can’t, because the President got involved.

I missed the whole thing the first time around. Dr. “Skip”Gates is a distinguished academic at the most distinguished university on this side of the world. He got rousted at his house- apparently lost his keys or something on a trip to China, and a concerned neighbor called the cops when she saw him jimmying the door to gain entry.

That is when the story gets a little hazy, since the media has extensively interviewed both parties, and both have had time to get their stories straight.

I still missed it, since I was trying to explain in the kitchen how a massive infusion of new tax money on top of some ill-defined savings was going to produce universal health care without bankrupting the future. I completely missed the question about Dr. Gates, which was the first time in the press conference that the President really showed some passion in the sea of statistics.

He called the cops stupid, or words to that effect.

My sympathy is of course with Mr. Gates, who was arrested at his own house, and I am strongly of the view that a man’s home is his castle. Race is a huge factor in this, of course, and the partisans on both loony ends of the spectrum have put it firmly in the entrenched bias of the Republic, and the fallacy of the post-racial age ushered in by our first President of color.

This morning we all know more than the President did, and I have to say that Dr. Gates blew it. He failed to follow the first rule in dealing with people with guns. “Don’t yell at them.”

Black or white, it does not work out well. I’m inclined to be sympathetic to the notion that people of color get stopped and hassled more than white people, and the President even beat up his own grandmother in his famous conversation on race during the campaign for her behavior when encountering African Americans on the street.

In my case, I’m a known white male of moderate size, unlike Dr, Gates. I imagine law enforcement officials size me up in terms of threat index as one of the first orders of business when they see me, the same way we always think about what it would be like to canoodle persons of the opposite sex on first meeting.

Sorry, it is hard-wired in the genes. The trick is not to be obvious about it, and try to be polite.

In listening to the heated rhetoric this morning, I was reminded this morning of a night a couple decades ago. I was relaxing at my residence in the gentle Hawaiian evening.

There was a celebration of sorts in progress, since we had just completed a very sensitive operation coordinating the response to some Soviet Fast Attack submarines which had been deployed to the waters off Cape Flattery, our primary boomer base in the NW Pacific.

I had guests, nice folks, and it is possible that we were a little noisy about the successful conclusion of something that had taken months of around-the-clock labor.

I did not have any more than maybe twenty beers over the course of the afternoon and evening, and maybe the music was a tad loud for the neighbors. Anyway, I was polite to the police when they showed up at the door. At least at first. They demanded to see my identification, even after I offered to turn down the tunes, and then attempted to walk away with it.

I was quite determined to get it back, and it is possible that a couple friends maybe grabbed me to preclude an attempt to get it back.

That physical restraint may have been what separated me from going down to the station with the police officers, but it did not stop some official paperwork from showing up at the Fleet Headquarters the next Monday morning.

The cops did not offer to drop the charges, as they did with Dr. Gates, but of course President Reagan did not deign to comment on the injustice of my situation.

I was well within my rights, as I understood them, and so were the cops. They can do whatever they want, if they are summoned on a complaint, as they were in the unfortunate case of Dr. Gates.

Dr. Gates apparently shares my passion for individual liberty, and the sanctity of his home. I had to get over a certain sense of entitlement when I took off the uniform, since I was accustomed professionally to deference in the workplace that was based on rank, rather than common civility. I know some folks who have a hard time with that, and I think Dr. gates may be more sensitive about it than I am.

Goes with the territory, which is why the President defended him. The problem is that he forgot about the rule that applies to all men, and to a slightly lesser degree, to all women, too. When dealing with the authorities you have to exercise restraint, even when they are flat-ass wrong.

Do not yell at people with guns. There are even worse things that can happen than handcuffs.

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