Glenn Beck recently said that President Obama hated “whites and the white culture,” which made me wonder: just what the heck is “white culture?” I mean, there was Shakespeare and then four hundred years later “Shakespeare in Love,” and in between it’s kind of a crapshoot. Trying to find something that’s authentically “white,” with no influence from a minority culture (or something that wasn’t ripped off from another group) is awfully hard to find.

As it happened, the context behind Beck’s idiotic statement (one of many he’s prone to make on his chat show/on-air therapy session on Fox News) was the arrest of Henry Louis Gates at his own house. President Obama said the Cambridge police reacted “stupidly,” which was pretty stupid on his part. But it’s all good, by the time this appears on the website the prez will have the arresting officer and Gates over to the White House for a beer (conservatives no doubt condemning him for promoting drinking). But the questions about where we are as a nation, in this “post-racial” age, aren’t going away.

When Barack Obama was elected, we patted ourselves on the back, able to finally transcend the thorny issue of race as a dividing line amongst ourselves. America was finally transcending the petty barriers of racial differences, rising as one to greet the sunshine of a new day. Somewhere in his underground lair, Dick Cheney was plotting with the Joker and Two-Face how to get back under Batman’s skin. Six months later, it turns out we’re still victims of age-old prejudices that our ancestors were nice enough to pass on to us.

The Gates case so far has proven the exception to the rule (as in “racist white cop harasses black guy for being black”). Gates, a Harvard professor, had to break into his house because it seems, with all his degrees, he wasn’t smart enough to carry a spare pair of keys. The arresting officer, a white guy, taught classes for the police department on how to avoid racial profiling. His fellow police officers went out of their way to testify to his lack of racial prejudice. From police reports, it seems that he caught Gates on a bad mood day (no doubt accentuated by the fact that he couldn’t get into his own house). Unless something comes up that contradicts this (or Brett Favre rears his head in because he’s a media-attention whore), it looks like the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

Which leads me back to Glenn Beck, an idiot savant minus the “savant” part. Guys like him (and to be fair, Keith Olbermann on the other side of the aisle) make a living out of saying stupid things like “President Obama is a racist” or “Broccoli is an ally of al-Qaeda,” and then they sit back and garner attention for what they say no matter how off-base it is. That’s the lousy thing about free speech: it applies to everyone, no matter how much of a crackpot you are. It doesn’t matter that Beck is crazy in a “Randy Quaid in ‘Independence Day’” way. He can say that Obama doesn’t care about white people, and there are people who will thank him for “having the guts” to say something. Regarding his specific charge against the president, let me just say this to Mr. Beck: in my old job, I had to clean toilets as part of my nightly duties. I know a turd when I see one, and in regards to you, well…

Professor Gates didn’t think before he started laying into the arresting officer (just because he was white, he had to be a bigot, right?), and President Obama didn’t think before he said the police were stupid. Glenn Beck obviously didn’t think before he said the president was some kind of reverse-Klan member. Ever wonder what would happen if people thought before they spoke?