The mug with the slice of lemon is in front of Officer Crowley. So the one actual working man at the “beer summit” either drinks beer with lemon or ordered ice tea. How do you like that? (Update, James Fallows says Crowley drank Blue Moon Wheat Beer, which Fallows calls “Faux microbrew.” Update 2, The NYT says that’s orange, not lemon, in Crowley’s mug, and that Biden had a lime slice in his; Biden’s mug is the one in the left foreground. Bottom line: no actual lemon around, so I changed the title of the post.)
The photo series shows Vice President Biden present but not talking. (Update, It says here Biden is a teetotaler and drank nonalcoholic beer. Imagine if he did drink.)
Prof. Gates’s statement contains the following:
Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control.
Yeah, inextricably as metaphors. I guess that’s Harvard for you.
The quote from Officer Crowley in the AP story is pretty vapid:
“I think what you had today was two gentlemen agreeing to disagree on a particular issue. I don’t think that we spent too much time dwelling on the past. We spent a lot of time discussing the future.”
What particular issue? I guess Crowley said it was okay for him to arrest someone because he doesn’t like the guy’s conversation, and Gates said he wasn’t so sure. Then, looking to the future, they discussed getting a time-share in Nantucket. (Update, Crowley told reporters he and Gates are going to meet again on their own. His video clip is at the bottom of the linked-to post.)
Prof. Harvard, to go back to his comments, was generous in his hopes for the outcome of the “national conversation” (yikes) about his arrest:
There’s reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand.
I say generous because the policing peril in this particular case was being mouthed off to by a professor.
I’m always polite to police officers. On the other hand, they’re always polite to me, and from what I’ve seen the good ones stay polite in some fairly difficult situations. (My neighborhood fills up late at night with drunken clubgoers of all races, and there have been a couple of shootings over the years.) They’re called peace professionals for a reason. They keep the peace and they’re professional about it. They don’t go dragging you off to booking just because they lost an argument.
Crowley gets to go to the White House because he screwed up his job, and now he wants to “agree to disagree” about his behavior. Life is hell for the beleaguered white man in Obama’s America.
(update, I edited this post a bit to make it read better. After posting it first, I mean.)
