Friday, April 27, 2018
It’s an incredibly sad day, hearing that a jury convicted Bill Cosby.
I feel almost the same way I did when prosecutors decided one trial
wasn’t enough to get O.J. Simpson and changed the concept of law to say people
can be tried twice for the same crime.
This is not to say Bill Cosby is innocent.
But no jury anywhere on the planet was free from hearing the crucifixion
of Cosby in the media. So, it becomes very, very difficult to know if he got a
fair trial at all.
We live in an era of new vigilantism known as MeToo in which media is
complicit – willing to try and convict someone in the public arena long before
the case is actually brought to trial.
Now, men wear the scarlet letter and Cosby’s conviction sets the stage
for additional abuses, just as Watergate did in the political arena.
Media like the attack dogs we are has gotten the taste of blood, and
nothing will get it out of our mouths.
This is not new. Guilt by accusation goes back centuries and has
touched many cultures. Christ suffered it when Pilate washed his hands.
Like O J, Cosby was a black man that should have transcended race,
someone who supposedly did everything right as far as the system is concerned
but managed to cross an imaginary social line that society as a whole could not
accept.
O J supposedly killed a white woman; Cosby supposedly drugged and raped
scores of women. And this is unacceptable for a white or black man.
Yet there is something terribly symbolic in these convictions, a kind
of ironic lynching since few trials of white men – regardless of how well-known
or powerful – achieved such notoriety. This, of course, with the exceptions of
Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, both of whom have faced similar trials in the
media and to date, both have survived.
I understand O.J. best, frustrated and enraged by a failed marriage, in
which his ex-wife publicly taunted him until he snapped and allegedly killed
her.
Clinton makes sense, too, since many political leaders have used their
positions to elicit sex.
The whole silliness of Trump has turned The New York Times and The
Washington Post into cheap tabloids, revealing for the first time just how
pathetic the two most powerful newspapers in the country really are.
Cosby makes no sense.
Like Trump and Clinton, he had all the power in the world to get almost
any woman he might have wanted without having to drug them.
But like some cheap skid row pimp, Cosby didn’t feel confident enough
in his own manhood to simply ask. Maybe he was secretly insecure and could not
handle rejection. Maybe he got off on the power the drugging gave him, not just
to have sex, but to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted and could get
away with it.
Like most tragic heroes, it is some flaw in his character that
ultimately brought him down, exposing him to the worst elements of society –
vigilantes and media – who like wolves waited just out of view to attack him –
a very powerful black man who should have been far beyond their reach, perhaps
too good, the way those Native Americans were when Andrew Jackson forced them onto
the trail of tears. No matter how white those Native Americans were, or how beyond
race OJ and Cosby seemed to be, in the end, they became the target of
unrelenting attacks – inspired by their own actions, a lesson for any person of
color who thinks doing all the right white things will make him immune.
The howl of MeToo will focus on Cosby’s victims, and perhaps rightly
so. As with Watergate, there really was something at the end of this rainbow for
the vigilantes to sink their teeth into. But just as in Watergate, this will
inspired both MeToo and media to continue their campaign against all men, who will
be tried in public long before they ever get to face a jury, and lacking the resources
of an OJ or a Cosby, will likely plea guilt even when they are innocent, or get
convicted in an obsessed arena for Cosby like crimes when they are not anywhere
near as onerous.
This is the problem with the Cosby conviction, it will give these
groups new license to kill.
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