When we were young, Bill Cosby was a
positive force for encouragement and reconciliation. Growing up in a
hyper-conservative church, coping with a spirit of marginalization that
typified the us and them estrangement of fundamentalism, I and my peers found Bill
Cosby’s borderline irreverent Noah routines startlingly refreshing. His 1963-64 album Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right!” included several comic
dialogues between Noah and God that captured the humor often missing from
sermons, but all too accurately portraying humanity in all its foibles,
cleverly typifying our own struggles to be the people God wanted us to be, even
though we were clearly not. Being
teenagers, my friends and I regularly amused and assailed each other with the
payoff line of Noah’s snide reply to his puzzled neighbor about the purpose of
this gigantic thing he’s building that’s spilling across his neighbor’s
driveway: “How long can you tread water?” (“Noah: And the Neighbor”). In the
final routine, “Noah: Me and You, Lord,” God fires back the same words to the
exasperated Noah’s angry complaints and resistance to finish the project in
obedience to God’s will, “How long can you
tread water.?” Suddenly, amid the sound of crashing thunder and driving, a
chastened Noah bleats, “Me and You, Lord – all the way!”
As is still true
today, those were days of great tension between white and black people, as the
trajectory arced from the white-entitlement resistance to the civil rights
movement, through the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the
responsive riots in many cities, including my birth city, Plainfield, New
Jersey, where a policeman was stomped to death by an outraged crowd of
citizens. But Bill Cosby’s was a
consistent voice of reconciliation in those years.
Wikipedia notes,
in its excellent entry, updated on September 30, 2018, the
Sunday after Bill Cosby was incarcerated, that he remained a positive force for
peacemaking: “While many comics of the time were using the growing
freedom of that decade to explore material that was controversial and sometimes
risqué, Cosby was making his reputation with humorous recollections of his
childhood. Many Americans wondered about the absence of race as a topic in
Cosby's stories. As Cosby's success grew he had to defend his choice of
material regularly; as he argued, ‘A white person listens to my act and he
laughs and he thinks, “Yeah, that's the way I see it too.” Okay. He's white.
I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are
alike. Right? So I figure this way I'm doing as much for good race relations
as the next guy.”[1][i]
When Aída and I
were ministering in Newark, one of our most enjoyable times of snatching a little
relaxation on a Saturday night was to join the mothers and babies, the young
men and women on dates, the elderly residents and other neighbors, all of us
squirreled away in small apartments, many crowded into walk-up efficiencies
above the city stores, gathering together at the local theater to see the
latest urban-oriented action movie. By the time we arrived, those who had been
there all day were quoting the lines before the actors up on the screen did and
hooting at their various pratfalls and foibles.
One of the best was Bill Cosby’s Let’s
Do It Again, in which he co-starred with the distinguished actor Sidney
Poitier. VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever dismisses this film with the
words, “Lesser sequel to ‘Uptown Saturday Night,’” and rates it with a mere
bone and a half,[2]
but that, I believe, is because their reviewer did not see the movie with an
urban audience and so missed how exhilarating a movie it really is for its
target crowd. A milkman and a factory worker on a mission for their lodge struggle
with gangsters and all other comers by using completely non-violent tactics to
succeed. What a salutary message for
1975 – or any year!
That same spirit
of reconciliation filled “The Cosby Show” (1984 and on), and its celebration of
family, which, along with all his other prolific work, earned Bill Cosby
numerous honors and Emmys and honorary degrees (besides his earned degrees,
including a doctorate in education).
So what on earth
happened? How is it that this past week
on Tuesday (September 25) he went to jail for three to ten years on three
counts of “indecent assault” amid a host of allegations of drugging numerous
young women with methaqualone (Quaaludes) and sexually assaulting them. How
could this have happened over so many years to a person who worked so hard to
promote a spirit of reconciliation in some of the modern United States’ most
difficult times of estrangement? How could this public paragon of peace, end up
being revealed as a private predator, destroying so many women’s lives? His crime
was not a one-time event when someone gets drunk, inhibitions drop, he rapes
someone, and sobers up horrified and repentant from then on. His pattern of
sexual violence went on and on and on, year after year, victim after victim. This was an addiction to violent assault and
Bill Cosby became a permanent victim of his violent addiction.
In that way, his
own life less paralleled Noah’s (who himself may appear to have had an
addiction to alcohol [see Genesis 9:21]) and more paralleled that of King
David, whose own sexual addiction (see 2 Samuel 5:13) escalated to his rape of
Bathsheba and murder of her husband (see
2 Samuel, chapter 11), a failing passed on to his heirs: Amnon, his first born,
who violently raped his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13:14-15), Absalom, who
slept with his father’s ten concubines in order to steal the kingdom from him
(2 Samuel 16:22), Solomon, his surviving
heir, whose “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines”
“from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, ‘You must not
intermarry with them,because they will surely turn your hearts after their
gods…led him astray,” having “turned his heart after other gods” (2 Kings
11:1-4). David’s, Amnon’s, Absalom’s,
Solomon’s sexual weaknesses destroyed their rule and blighted their lives.
Addictions
unchecked in private, lead to headlines like this in public: “The Bill Cosby
Case: Glimpses of a Downfall” and “Bill Cosby, Once a Model of Fatherhood, Is
Sentenced to Prison.” A reputation of honor so carefully constructed, destroyed
at the end in a ruin of disgrace.
The lesson is
obvious: an addiction, whether it be to criminal actions like rape and other
instances of violent assault, child pornography, use of illegal drugs or even
to such common and somewhat currently socially accepted yet predatory,
invasive, and pernicious habits as use of soft
core pornography, marijuana, alcohol use to drunkenness, all undermine
one’s well-being and ultimately threaten to destroy one’s health, positive
image, and walk with God. If we don’t take effective steps to eliminate it,
trying to live with an addiction is like trying to tread water as the sea of
their consequences engulfs us. It’s only
a matter of time until we drown in it, for how long can we tread water?
Bill
Please see our video on Aída’s
and my new novel, CAVE OF LITTLE FACES (Wipf and Stock), an uplifting adventure
full of mystery and romance, https://youtu.be/084TpLK2mac.
