The Cosby tragedy
A fall of Shakespearean dimension and pathos
The sentencing of actor and comic Bill Cosby to three to 10 years in prison for aggravated indecent assault is a sad epilogue to a tragic American story.
The man once known as “America’s dad” is in a prison cell as you read this.
The whole saga remains almost impossible to fathom. This man who helped to break the color barrier on TV, who made millions laugh for decades, whose LP comedy records marked millions of childhoods, who championed quality children’s TV and earned an advanced degree for himself in education, was a premeditating rapist?
A court of law has ruled that he is and has taken his freedom.
Bill Cosby was hugely important to civil rights in this country in many ways. He supported Martin Luther King Jr. and used his own early fame to speak out against segregation. The audience for his comedy and for his hit TV show, in which an African-American man played a stable family man who happened to be a physician, was a mass audience, and an integrated one. He was a great supporter of jazz and of AfricanAmerican art.
Bill Cosby did many good things in his life.
And we now know that he also did dastardly, unspeakable things.
His fall is Greek and Shakespearean.
Maybe it is worth saying, as other charges fly about other men in another realm and day, that none of us is God, and while the courts judge a case, only God judges the entirety of a life and a soul.
Bill Cosby may do something good on the last day of his life.
And the quality of a loving God, as well as those who follow him, in any religion, is mercy. If Cosby, now 81 and mostly blind, is eventually sent to a minimum security prison and is back home in a year or two, most Americans will feel relief, not disgust. Mercy and compassion are woven into the nature of our country.
But how to explain this man’s fall at the last? Some sort of internal wiring in his head was faulty? Original sin? The Hugh Hefner-1960s philosophy? (”If it feels good, do it.”) Or was it power? Bill Cosby was a star, in various media, for decades. As we have watched a parade of Hollywood stars and producers, and also TV news executives, walk the plank of public opinion in shame as their abuses were revealed, the one common denominator is power.
Celebrity in America leads not only to great wealth, but power — in many cases ultimate power over the lives and fortunes of other human beings. “Power,” said the wise and great historian John Dalberg-Acton, “tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”