Perspectives on the Bill Cosby Mistrial

For the past couple of years, I have been watching with interest as Bill Cosby's reputation has been shredded by a series of allegations that he took certain "liberties" with a number of women, many of which allegedly happened over 50 years ago.  I personally think much of this was an attempt to frame Cosby, as a bigger agenda is afoot, and for that we need to examine a few things.

I have been a lifelong Cosby fan, and fondly remember in particular his cartoon series, Fat Albert, which was based in part on his own childhood when he grew up in Philadelphia.  Fat Albert was of course a cartoon that featured African-American characters (I also will be addressing that term "African-American" shortly), but it taught many good values - every episode of the cartoon had a moral lesson to teach its young viewers, and that made it not only an endearing program for young children to watch, but also a safe program.  It is really too bad that more programming geared toward kids is not that wholesome, and America has a lot to thank Bill Cosby for.   Later, when I started collecting records, I discovered that Cosby had a series of hilarious comedy LP's that he made in the 1960's and early 1970's, and one of them was this one:

This LP, released on Warner Brothers Records in 1965, is a classic album - it has clean, decent, yet hilariously funny standup comedy, and it was one of the recordings I found many years ago at the Rio Mall in Rio, WV, for a quarter when I first got into seriously collecting records.  Although my record collection was primarily big bands, I stumbled across this by accident and had to get it - one of the best quarters I ever spent!  Many years later, I found it as a CD reissue, and still have it as part of my collection today.  Cosby was, for me, one of the most clever and talented comedians that ever found fame, and his stand for good values was always a great example for Black kids who were encouraged by Cosby in many of his TV programs and other ventures to better themselves and learn to accept responsibility and not rely on the "victim mentality" that so many Black activists were pushing in those days (and still are for that matter).  It was that conviction, which Cosby has openly expressed many times over the years, which probably caused a lot of the issues he is facing now - the "political correct" liberal establishment sees him as an embarrassment in that he tells Blacks to own their behavior and act better than they often are portrayed.  And, he is right - Black people, as fellow human beings, have all the same potential and giftings to do amazing things, but oftentimes they fall into the "thug culture" or entitlement mentality as pushed by a bunch of racist Leftists who in the name of "equality" goad the negative stereotypes and thus create division.  A Leftist like Nancy Pelosi, by encouraging negative behavior, is actually the worst type of racist - liberal Democrats have a lot in common with madmen like Charles Manson and Jim Jones in that regard, because their "divide and conquer" mentality of nurturing bad behavior and steretypes creates the racial tension such people thrive off of, and that is why they don't like Bill Cosby - he has had a different message over the years, and the Lefties don't like it.  So, they took him down - we've seen it many other times too.

In the early 1980's Cosby also achieved huge success with a Thursday night sitcom on NBC called The Cosby Show, which depicted a stable middle-class Black family in a positive light and also served to help Blacks and Whites get along better - when Blacks and Whites realized that the stereotypes of each other were stupid and didn't define a whole ethnicity, it created a good environment for friendship and encouragement.  Of course, naturally the Liberals didn't like that, so Jesse Jackson then had to make disparaging remarks against Jews to cause tension.  It is interesting that after all these years, there are still people who cannot be happy unless they get people to hate each other, and Democrats are masters of that.  As we'll see soon enough, what they are doing could cause worse damage, and it already has.

Now that we have established my personal history of admiration for Cosby's work and what he stands for, there are a few observations I want to make.  I am bound to create some enemies on this one, and honestly could care less - the truth can be disturbing sometimes, and there are people who will try to suppress it and revise it to suit their worldview, but in the end the truth shall prevail.

The first observation I want to make is something I noticed which was ominously absent from Cosby's whole ordeal.   Usually, when a high-ranking Black public figure is put under the microscope, the radical cockroaches such as Al Sharpton are out in full force, and of course Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan have to run their big mouths about it too, bemoaning themselves as "victims" of "White privilege" and other such nonsense.  Author Kenneth Timmerman (who also happens to be a member of my parish church) notes in his 2002 best-seller Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson (Washington, DC:  Regnery Publishing) that Jesse Jackson is a master at what he calls the "shakedown" - by extortion of corporations and businesses by using "White guilt" tactics, and then also using his "service" to Black communities in major cities as a front to further his own agenda (Timmerman, p. 422).  In reality, Jesse Jackson is nothing more than a Black Walter Mitty, which entails a legacy based on lies and manipulation and not on true service to his own people.  By contrast, Bill Cosby has always tried to foster a positive image of the Black family, and in doing so he has done more for race relations than Jackson ever could, and that - excuse the expression - pisses off the Liberals.  I mean, think about it - if Blacks started to really pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and actually were able to sustain themselves, then who would White Liberal politicians exploit??  And, that leads me to the whole point of this discussion.  There is a racism evident in the treatment of Cosby that is actually real, for the same people who want to hang Cosby are also the same people that think that Bill Clinton is a paragon of statesmanship.   Yet, we all remember Clinton's legacy, don't we?  Even while occupying the Oval Office, "Slick Willie" was so driven by his own libido that he couldn't keep his tackle in the box - remember names like Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Monica Lewinsky?  Clinton should have been tossed out on his philandering keister on the street, but because he was a White President, he was excused from his own horniness.  Those now who accuse Cosby of the same things are not as forgiving of him, and it begs a question - is a White ex-President immune from the law while a Black comedian is not?   Again, where are Jackson and Sharpton while Cosby is being accused of things that may not even be true?   From their offices these days, one hears the deafening chirps of crickets.  The easy way to remedy this is that Bill Clinton should be brought to justice just as swiftly - put his sorry butt on the stand and grill him with questions until he is well-done, and then lock him up in retirement at Leavenworth.  However, that won't happen, will it?

The true face of "White Privilege?" 

A second point I want to make is that the bulk of American Blacks are not "African-Americans," and they also don't have a culture unique to them either.  An actual "African-American" is someone who comes here from an African country up until maybe four generations - for example, my parish priest, who is originally from Congo; he is a true African-American.  Also, much of the "Afrocentrism" is actually racist itself, as it fosters stereotypes about Africa and its people.  In reality, Africa is a culturally diverse continent, and there are notable differences between an Amazigh (Berber) in Algeria and a Kalahari Bushman.  Africans, in other words, are many peoples, many ethnicities, with each having their own culture and legacy.  To see what is promoted in some Black communities as "Afrocentric" though, it would lead a less-informed person to assume that every person in Africa wears a dashiki and speaks Swahili while beating on large drums and diddling with chimpanzees or something, and that is a bad stereotype.  Many African people who have come to the US - including my parish priest, as well as my many Ethiopian Christian friends - are actually quite disturbed by the attitudes of American Blacks who stereotype their cultures.  Proper education in this regard is key.

  Years ago when I was a poor kid growing up in rural West Virginia, we read a couple of books in school that have stuck with me to this day because I identified so much with them.  One was Louisa Shotwell's book Roosevelt Grady, about a young Black migrant boy in the 1930's who traveled around with his extended family doing farm work as different crops came into season.  The second book was William H. Armstrong's book Sounder, which chronicled the story of a young Black sharecropper's son from Mississippi or Alabama in the Depression and how a stray coondog transformed his life, even when his father was carted off to jail. Both of these books were written by Black authors, and were about the Black experience of growing up poor in the Depression years, but both related a lot to my own childhood when I was a kid too - growing up as I did with a single mother, and often living with relatives, I would read books like these and actually see myself in the story.   Blacks and Appalachian people share a lot in common, more so than many "Progressives" want to admit, and in many cases ours is a shared experience.  There is a reason for that - we have essentially the same culture.  Thomas Sowell, himself Black and a highly-qualified commentator on current events, notes that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed at the middle of the 20th century that the Blacks he encountered had a culture that bore a remarkable resemblance to that described of Southern Whites, even noting in his book An American Dilemma that "Black English" is simply a variation upon the Southern accent (Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  San Francisco:  Encounter Books, 2005. p. 29).   Indeed, many Southerners, both Black and White, share much of the same cuisine, speech patterns, and other cultural norms, something the Blacks carried with them to major metropolitan areas across the US - "soul food," then, is just plain ol' Southern cooking!  As mentioned, I have more in common in my upbringing with the poor Blacks of the South than do many of the loudmouths, such as Jackson and Sharpton, and thus I know what it is like to feel disadvantaged.  As for the mythology of "White privilege," it exists, but not in the way or on the scale the secularized Liberal establishment would have one think.  The true "privilege" is enjoyed by glossed-over criminals such as Bill Clinton, not the average hard-working White (or for that matter Black, Hispanic, or other) guy who supports his family and lives his life minding his own business.  There is also, it seems, more "privilege" being enjoyed by those who holler about it the most, and let me give you an example.  At a law firm in Tampa, FL, where I used to work as an administrative contractor, there was a young Black paralegal who was originally from Washington, DC, by the name of Sean.  Sean was basically a nice guy, but on one occasion in a discussion he started denouncing the United States as a "racist society" that Blacks should not be part of.  So, calmly I asked him about his upbringing.  It turns out that he grew up in a fairly comfortable middle-class environment and never lacked for much, and at the time I worked with him in the law firm, he made about 3 times my salary and he was doing pretty well for himself.  So, I told him about my upbringing, as well as about some of the kids who grew up in the town I lived in for most of my later childhood and early teen years - how many of us came from broken homes, we survived on food stamps and other aid, and many of the neighbor kids around me ended up in dire straights as adults because no one really reached out to them, and all of us were White kids.  After telling him that, I asked him, "which one of us is truly privileged?"  He didn't say a word.  That is why often the talking-heads who get on their media soapboxes with pithy pontifications about "White privilege" don't know what the hell they are talking about, because in many cases they themselves have discriminated against and belittled the kids of the Appalachians.  So, how does this relate to Cosby?  I will tell you - Cosby was an inspiration to me as well, because the example he set served as one motivation among many others to take the initiative, rise above the adversity, and do something about my situation.  He directed that message mostly to his fellow Blacks, who should have listened, but some of his poor White audience actually did.  So, instead of trying to destroy the man, perhaps we should be celebrating the positive impact he's had on so many, whether it was the values communicated by the Fat Albert cartoons, or those later expressed by example in The Cosby Show.  If more kids would take the example of Fat Albert teaching kids about respect and dignity of personhood rather than emulating a jackass like Justin Bieber, our society would recover from the damage it has suffered quicker, and racism would not even be a discussion because people would be respecting each other and getting along.  And, in case some Liberal pansey misses it, when it comes to "race," there is only one, and it has a name - HUMAN!  All others are just ethnicities that express that God loves variety in His creation.  If you want to eradicate racism, that is the attitude that should be promoted, not the mindless rioting and mobs of the "Black Lives Matter" terrorists.  Cosby tried to tell his own people that, and he got punished - it is tragic really.  And, that leads to another point.

One thing disturbs many of us who have been keeping up with the kangaroo court that is attempting to condemn Cosby.  After all these years, all of a sudden these crazy women start coming out of the woodwork like cockroaches out of a garbage dump, and they all have these "stories."  Are they real?? Evidence seems to cast a lot of doubt on it.  A lot of other things don't make sense either.  For one, Cosby has been out of the limelight for almost 20 years - nothing was heard or said about him for a long time, so why now is all the attention being directed at him?  Also, if these women were so "traumatized" over these alleged indiscretions, why are they now all of a sudden talking about it - I mean, if they were under that much duress, why not deal with it when it happened (if it even is true)?  This and many more questions trouble me about this lynch mob who all of a sudden are wanting Cosby's head on a pike - the hate and fickleness that even professed "Conservatives" are displaying against this poor man make no rational sense.  Let's assume the worst - maybe in his younger years Cosby did mess around a little.  If that were the case, there are some things to take into consideration.  First, most of these allegations have a setting in time of over fifty years ago, and isn't there a statute of limitations?   Second, there is the human factor - Cosby would probably be the first to admit his humanity, and that like anyone else he is capable of mistakes.  So, let's say he had a lapse in judgment and took advantage of a woman then - has he done it recently??  For the most part, Cosby has been free of controversy pretty much his entire career, and the evidence speaks for itself on that one.  If he messed up in younger years, what does it matter now?   And, third - seriously, the man is 79 years old, so are they seriously going to try to lock him up when he may have at most 15 years of his life left??  He's now an old man, for crying out loud!  I find it interesting that they want to lock him up for that, but for some reason one of the most violent and despicable killers in recent history, Charles Manson, still sits comfortably in his cell leeching off the tax payers when he should have been put to death a long time ago - where is the justice there?   Cosby is not near the evil demoniac that Manson is, yet Manson seems to get more "privilege."  No cries of "racism" there, I noticed!  Also, what if these alleged "victims" are committing perjury - I would bet they would just get a "slap on the wrist," unlike the stigma Monica Lewinsky had to endure when Bill Clinton pawed her like a cat turd in a litter box.  I think the true acts of racism are being ignored, and that false accusations of "racism" seem to "whup-up" people more, which is what the Liberals count on - it is their bread and butter that keeps them in office and gives them their power.  And, let's look at a truly repugnant individual who has done something much worse recently, that trollop Kathy Griffin.  Griffin threatened the President of the United States, and she even threatened his 11-year-old son, but I don't hear near the outcry concerning that in contrast to the attention poor Bill Cosby has gotten.  I guess a nasty, foul-mouthed White woman has more value than an elderly Black man - that is the message the "tolerant" Progressive Liberals are sending.  Truly amazing.

I wanted to write this because as I see it, Cosby has been framed on trumped-up allegations, and in time the truth will be revealed.  Apparently, it is starting to reveal itself now as evidenced by the hung-jury that led to the mistrial in his case.  That is a small victory for justice, but it may not be over - Cosby is now an "enemy" of Leftist "Progress" all because he said this:  Black fathers need to take responsibility for raising their children right.  He is not the only Black man who said this, as another Black news personality, Don Lemon, noted something similar when he said this:

  "Black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing: hike up your pants, finish school, stop using the N-word, take care of the community, and stop having children out of wedlock."  (http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/bill-cosby-black-fathers-raise/2013/09/16/id/525908/ - accessed 6/20/2017).  

Both Lemon and Cosby are right about this, and they share that sentiment with others such as Ben Carson, Alan Keyes, and Thomas Sowell.  I don't have a place to tell them myself personally, but perhaps they should listen to some of their own people giving them a wake-up call.  The Cosby issue illumines many things, not the least being that racism is real, does exist, but oftentimes it is perpetrated by those who holler about it the most.  By encouraging bad behavior and negative stereotypes among Blacks, Progressive Liberals and their "plantation pimp" cohorts such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are doing more harm to America's Black community than good, and that will have bad repercussions on day if it is not rectified.  That being said, may we all learn something out of this.