Know what? He probably meant it

Another seeker after 15 minutes of Gates fame blundered into it with both feet: Boston policeman Justin Barrett chose the best possible means of being known as the author of his slur against Gates: a mass email. Ask anyone who has hit the bricks after doing the same thing.

Worse, he was probably sincere when he told CNN that he is "not a racist."

Barrett, you should not do magic you do not understand. At the moment, this fool is a stand-in for every white male in the country who thinks that he was entitled from birth to a superior place in the universe by virtue of being a white het male. That sense of entitlement has led tens of millions of white het males to fuck off between the ages of five and 18, barely graduate from high school, and then look around for someone to blame when the world did not become their oyster. Many people in that condition take a round turn on themselves, become educated or develop durable skills, and make themselves into human beings entitled to respect they have actually earned.

The rest whine. They began whining over 40 years ago, with the advent of AM talk radio, and they haven't stopped since. Enabled by the talk show hosts, they prefer thinking of themselves as a repressed underclass rather than as the authors of their own troubles.

And of course, they've found the Web, even if they don't understand it. For example, they think it is more anonymous than talk radio when it is actually the most transparent medium in existence. But seduced by this apparent anonymity, people who may be mostly polite to their peers, good to their families, and civil to people of every race and background pop the cork on their seething inner rage--their bitter disappointment that being born to a particular race is not enough to land you in the corner office anymore. These are the people whose rants spoil even the most basic, civil and self-evident Web discourse. They shout down everyone reasonable and hide behind the cloak of free speech: then they are shocked that any Web-savvy ten-year-old can out them to the world in under ten minutes. Of course they think that black people have become entitled on the basis of race. When last I looked, that was called projection.

Mayor Menino has said that Barrett is "G-O-N-E" from the Boston Police. Let's hope Menino keeps his word on that one, because Barrett just flunked the intelligence test from Life at Work 101: no mass emails that can bite you on the ankle, and they all can.

It was reported that the National Guard might dump him too. Now that would be too bad: Afghanistan is a good place to adjust attitudes like that.