I live in Amherst, I teach at Amherst College, and have done so for 24 years. I have never been stopped by police on suspicion of anything, except once, a UMASS traffic cop pulled me over because I had illegally u-turned at a light. I got off with a warning. I am a white man, who enjoys all the idiotic privileges that come with that accident of birth.

I have a colleague, an African American woman, a recently tenured professor who has been in Amherst for six years now. She has been pulled over by Amherst, Hadley, and Massachusetts State police close to once a month for the years she has lived here, in this predominantly white, famously progressive and inclusive town.

Those of you who have written suspecting Professor Gates, a 5'7" 150 pound, soft-spoken and deeply dignified man, did something worthy of being handcuffed are at best naive, but naive in the sense that William James once explained, that is to say, viciously naive. (James, for you ignoramuses, was a Harvard psychologist and philosopher of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who lived not too far from the same neighborhood as Professor Gates, but to my knowledge he was never led away in handcuffs,finger-printed, booked, and made to cool his heels for four hours in a police cooler.) Shame on you who point the finger at him. Your hate is showing.

PLEASE STOP POSTING THIS MORON. I'VE A PH.D. FROM AN IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY, I'M A TENURED PROFESSOR, I'VE PUBLISHED 5 BOOKS WITH MAJOR UNIVERSITY PRESSES, AND I SIMPLY WANT TO SAY SHE IS A TOTAL FRAUD. SHE ACCIDENTALLY BECAME CELEBRITY IN THE 1990S. NO REASON FOR SALON, SOMETIMES A PLACE OF SERIOUS DISCOURSE, TO SUPPORT THIS IDIOT.

IF I COULD HAVE POSTED THIS WITHOUT GOING TO THE ARTICLE ITSELF, I WOULD HAVE. PLEASE, SALON, PLEASE, STOP IT. SHE IS FULL OF CERTITUDE ABOUT NOTHING SHE HAS ANY, ANY KNOWLEDGE OF.

This is a sad and sordid story, I suspect as much a reflection of economic depredation as alcoholism. I have no doubt that alcohol consumption is on the rise these days.

Back in the 50s women smoked and drank through pregnancy -- my mother did. Now there is a lot more information, but its distribution is severely class biased. Help the poor woman, don't throw her in jail.

In the late '80s (if memory serves me) McNamara visited Amherst College for the first time since 1967, when the College's Trustees unwisely decided to award him an honorary degree, and the graduating class turned its collective back as he received it. As a fairly green assistant professor, I attended dinner with him after he spoke -- his public talk was about the lessons of Vietnam. Dinner conversation turned to the subject of Nicaragua, and the Reagan administration's domino like argument that communism was knocking at the door of our southern border. I asked McNamara what he thought of the situation. His answer revealed that he had never really abandoned his cold geopolitical calculations. He said, to paraphrase, that we should go to the Soviets (the Union still existed then) and say to them that we would stop funding the resistance in Afghanistan if they would stop funding the Nicaraguan government! In other words, the old bipolar world view, as though the Nicaraguans and the Afghans were mere pawns in a geopolitical world.

The best and the brightest indeed. Lind is right on one point, though. Bundy and Rostow were worse. He wrong overall, though. No one was more vilified than LBJ for his stubborn and hideous expansion of that conflict, not even Nixon, who, with Kissinger, was the worst of a bad lot of political leaders, Kennedy included.

Oh no! I recognized a bit of my old self in the BF. In times of stress in my marriage (I'm now a widower) I would rant about what a mess the house was, how no one but me seemed to do anything to clean up, and on and on. My wife wouldn't put up with it, she would wait until I had finished ranting, or was reduced to mumbling under my breath, and then say, "Are you done?" Then she would ask me what I thought really was wrong. I came, over the course of a couple of years, to ask myself that question when the usual disorder of the house would start upsetting me. That is, why are you so upset? What the hell is REALLY bothering you?

It isn't perfection anyone seeks, I suspect, but a sense of control. If BF doesn't let go of that, all the characterizations of him, sociopath, narcissist, etc., probably don't matter. What does matter is that he can't really control reality, and she can't let him try, because it will destroy her.

Interesting article, right up to the end, where, for reasons probably having to do with the knee jerk reflex of journalistic "balance," Kamiya has to attribute blame to starry eyed leftists who. . . what? I have no idea, except that maybe they don't participate in fighting the fight? But what of all of those who do? And is alienation something limited to "leftists," as though there is much of left left in California, or in the US for that matter?

Oh, you mean the absolutely empty column the preceded that last sentence, the one with the vague pronoun. At least try to learn how to write.

I promise not to read this column again, and hope that all other posters do the same. It isn't really outrageous, it is really simply dull and lame.