No Laughing Matter
Bill Cosby’s demons, and ours
But this whole matter is personal as well as polemical. Cosby was hurt. He felt betrayed. One of the things he said at the podium was that lower-class blacks were “not holding up their end of the deal.” He, like many of his generation, had invested years of hope and plowed lots of resources into bettering black people through education, a freedom dream that has endured since the end of slavery. Unlike the younger Rock, he had marched and protested for equal opportunity for blacks in the ’60s, only to be outdone on the national stage in the new millennium by a new breed of gangsterism that’s achieved a celebrity and acceptance that it shouldn’t have. He wants desperately to turn that tide, and maybe he figures, like Michael Moore, that the only way to do that is to eschew politesse altogether and become a really big mouth. It was perhaps less than gracious to open that mouth on a day meant for observation and sober reflection. But, alas, sobriety has not served us well. And there’s just never a good time to tell the truth.
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