Cosby's Series Finale

Bill Cosby got the book thrown at him at his sentencing for sexual assault - three to ten years in prison, which, at his age, is tantamount to a life sentence.  The judge doubts that Cosby will be paroled  when he is eligible in 2021, because he believes Cosby has a mental disorder that makes it impossible for him to stop assaulting women - 59 according to one count, though some have reported a higher number.  And it's twice and halved again the number of victims who had come forward when the revered and much-loved fashion model Beverly Johnson added her name to the list - at which point I stopped believing Cosby's  denials, for reasons I explained back in December 2014.   

In the years before comedian Hannibal Burris put rape allegations against Cosby - heretofore whispered but not talked about in public - out in the open and exposed Bill's hypocrisy in lecturing inner-city blacks on how to live their lives, Cosby was regarded as a comic genius.  Sophocles once said that you have to wait until a man reaches old age to see how well he lived his life, right?  His legacy looks a whole lot less admirable even without the now-confirmed rape charges, as his namesake 1980s sitcom, which started out as a realistic depiction of domestic life, quickly became a black version of "The Brady Bunch," and many of his movies - particularly any movie he did after he stopped working with Sidney Poitier in the late seventies - are among some of the worst films ever made.  I read one of his books; it was mostly a rewrite of his stand-up routine, which was the same stand-up routine from the concert movie Bill Cosby: Himself.   Mark Twain he ain't.  The late cultural critic Paul Fussell noted how Cosby was "a master of overstatement," an appraisal no doubt prompted by Cosby's halting vocal delivery and his over-reliance on his fleshy facial muscles.  Whatever charm Cosby once had, he managed to lose long before his sexual-assault history was revealed.  

Yesterday, at the United Nations, the world laughed at Donald Trump, another American known for his dubious personal life.  The world, in fact, had been laughing at us long before Trump hijacked the White House, and Bill Cosby, a symbol of our popular culture for worse and for even worse, is just one more regrettable element of our national fabric. Good riddance.