The Cosby post

Well, now.

It can't be any fun to reach the age of 77 after over a half-century of being adored and regarded as a symbol of avuncular wisdom and a wry-yet-playful maturity only to have it unravel in the space of a month.

The I-Spy breakthrough, the Cosby Kids Saturday morning cartoons (interesting footnote: in addition to Weird Harold, Fat Albert et al, the old Philadelphia neighborhood bunch included one future free-market economist named Walter Williams), the fundraising for Temple University, the PhD, the Jello Pudding commercials, the Cliff Huxtable character, and the upbraiding of hip-hoppers - in any discussion of the man, ever, the sordid sex life will assume prominence.

To draw parallels to, say, O.J. and the shock the American public felt upon discovering that The Juice, he of the Buffalo Bills, Hertz Rent-a-Car commercials, funny movies and NBC Sports commentating, turned out to have a view of intimacy and gender relations not unlike a feral thug would probably invite charges of a racial agenda.  So let's state for the record that sexual Neanderthals come in all races.  Witness the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, or John Lennon's remark that Beatles tours greatly resembled Fellini movies.  To cite a political example, much of America tried its damnedest to look the other way regarding Billy Jeff the Zipper until he had to fess up to a tryst with an intern.

Actually, taking a good long look at how expansive the club of revered public figures with dark sexual sides has the bracing yet healthy effect of prodding us to freshly examine the overall concept of celebrity.  Some public figure becomes so ubiquitous we see and hear them at least as often as people who are actually in our lives and know us in return (which celebs generally don't).  The difference is that you don't know a damn thing about the view out some celeb's dining room window, or his or her relation with a stepchild, the glimpses provided in Esquire or Glamour gushfest softball articles notwithstanding.

This raises an important point: the ability to become a celebrity has advanced hand-in-hand with technology.  Copernicus and Galileo had to present groundbreaking scientific papers that challenged our basic body of knowledge about the world to get famous.  Shakespeare and Marlowe had to be damn good playwrights.  Whitfield and Wesley could draw big crowds, but bear in mind those crowds were eager for a bracing dose of stern messages about redemption.  Once passenger sea travel was commonplace and the towns and cities of the American frontier erected theaters, a Jenny Lind or a Lily Langtree could become something of a star.  But once Edison's great inventions took off, the field got considerably more crowded.  Television exponentially expanded it.  Ditto the internet.

For one thing, it meant that a wider variety of criteria for celebrity emerged.  Vaudeville jugglers, opera singers and those who could knock a baseball out of the park were able to reach and wow us.

Celebrity status inevitably came to have an intoxicating effect on those who achieved it.  The phenomenon of the sycophantic entourage of hangers-on fed this.  It was not much of a leap from "this is all so amazing" to "I have quite a bit of power, don't I?"

Things changed for us spectators, too.  As entertainment and information became increasingly portable,  these figures assumed a greater presence in our daily lives.  We could selectively project aspects of who they were into our assumptions.

It was no secret even in the early years of Cosby's career that he led a fast life, hanging out at Hef's mansion and at Vegas casinos.  It was a weird time.  There was still a fairly monolithic sensibility in our society regarding what made for character, and he seemed to embody it in the way he carried himself most of the time.  Add to that the novelty of such phenomena as Playboy clubs and mansions - the cha-cha-cha wink-and-nod vibe of the earliest days of the sexual revolution - and much of America was willing to see the fast-lane portion of his life as an extension of the playfulness we found so charming.

That all has to be reconsidered now, doesn't it?  There was more to Hef's tit-soup, witty-repartee-and-neck-massages pool parties than was indicated in his magazine's pictorial spreads.  The truth involved a fair amount of exploitation  - read, date-rape drugs.

Cosby burst onto the national consciousness at a time of get-togethers of this sort, of go-go boots and miniskirts, elevation of popular music (rock, folk, jazz, country, Broadway) and entertainment generally into a sacrosanct expression of the noblest of truths and the attendant increase in influence of the industry that dispensed it to us, and pop psychology with a strong element of moral relativism.

Month by month, year by year, the good guys and gals flashing on our television screens chipped away at the standards we'd held for their behavior.  It was the basic pushing-the-envelope phenomenon.  And why not?  As the foundation for the old standards - the body of Judeo-Christian values that had been so bedrock as to be assumed as society moved forward - was more marginalized, what was to stop the chipping-away?

It's a bit like what I imagine the Genesis serpent's line to have been with Eve:  Come on, now, do you really see any difference between the apples on this one tree from those on the others?

The rapidly changing America of fifty years ago made it possible for us to come up with a rather sickly blend of admiration and behavior-excuse for celebrities that couldn't help but lead to the kind of nihilistic hypocrisy from which Bill Cosby cannot now hide.

We gave Cos a pass.  We're enablers.