Bob Dylan v. Henry Louis Gates

There were two very public police stops last month – one involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, the other involving music legend Bob Dylan.

The way they were handled is a study in contrasts with regard to good manners and good citizenship.

Everybody knows about the infamous incident in Cambridge in which Barack Obama's pal, Gates, received a routine call at his home by police investigating a neighbor's report of a possible break-in.

Instead of smiling, thanking the officer for his attention to protecting his life and property, Gates began spewing racial insults and accusing him of racial profiling. Not surprisingly, he was taken into custody – an act Obama characterized as "stupid" behavior by the police.

That incident took place July 16.

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The controversy occupied the media's attention for weeks, culminating in a White House "beer summit."

Less than a week later, on July 23, someone far more famous that Henry Louis Gates was stopped by police a few hundred miles to the south in Long Branch, N.J. Dylan, preparing for a concert nearby, got out of his tour bus on a rainy day and took a walk. He spotted a house for sale and, probably out of curiosity, decided to peer inside.

A neighbor, suspicious about a hooded man looking inside a vacant house, called police, who responded to the scene and asked the stranger for identification.

Dylan didn't have any – having left his ID on the tour bus. But he politely told the officers he was Bob Dylan.

Officer Kristie Buble, 24, had heard the name – but she had trouble believing it was really the legendary Dylan. So, she and her partner, Officer Derrick Meyers, also 24, insisted the singer-songwriter accompany them to his tour bus to produce the ID.

"Dylan was really cool about the whole incident," explained Sgt. Michael Ahart. When asked why he was soaking wet and walking around in the rain, Ahart said Dylan responded: "I just felt like going for a walk."

Because Dylan was cooperative and didn't accuse the police of profiling or harassment, the incident didn't make headlines. It didn't prompt a presidential intervention of any kind. No beer summit was necessary to defuse an international incident and an indictment of police everywhere in America.

That's because Bob Dylan exercised good citizenship and good manners as well as the kind of rationality we expect from self-governing people who don't make rash, baseless charges against police officers doing their job.

But, of course, Obama pal Gates was not interested in defusing a police incident. He was interested in enflaming one.

Why?

That's his nature. That's who he is. That's who he has always been. And the fact that this individual is respected so highly by the president of the United States illustrates the sad state of our nation.

Gates sees the world in black and white. Everything he does shows it – from recruiting radical black activists to his university department to being a prominent supporter of reparations for the descendants of black slaves and immortalizing the Stalinist, anti-American radical W.E.B. DuBois.

Is there a lesson here?

I suspect there are many.

Common sense tells us when we're stopped by police, even for a simple misunderstanding, it makes sense to be cooperative, not antagonistic. It's safer and more pleasant for all involved.

Most people know this intuitively from experience.

Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply in the White House and in the African-American studies department at Harvard University.

Bob Dylan, thank you for demonstrating that some Americans, even the very famous, still have some – along with courtesy, good citizenship and good manner, attributes and virtues Barack Obama and Henry Louis Gates could never appreciate.