Many have pointed out the quite different national attention given to one Kenneth Gladney, an African-American and apparent conservative who was roughed up by union thugs and subject to racial slurs outside a town meeting in St. Louis, seemingly for selling American flags. But there are probably lots of similar instances that retrospectively illustrate just how asinine was Prof. Henry Louis Gates’s behavior during his famous run-in with Cambridge police — not to mention the presidential reaction to it.

For example, 68-year-old Bob Dylan, in rolling-stone fashion, was innocently walking alone in a Long Branch, N.J., neighborhood recently. A 20-something police officer thought this was odd, and pulled over to question the suspect. No ID. Support was called in. Neither of the two officers recognized the American icon. Indeed, they apparently had never even heard of Bob Dylan — and so put him in the first squad car to take him back to his hotel to verify whether he was really an entertainer of some sort.

When his story checked out, the officers released him and left. A city official said of Dylan, “He couldn’t have been any nicer to them.” Apparently there were no Dylan rants about whom the police were “messin’” with, no reference to their mothers, no mayoral or gubernatorial editorial, no presidential sermon on police acting stupidly by profiling and putting a man in a police car for simply walking the street.

One wonders what would have happened had Gates acted like Dylan or Dylan like Gates?