Another New Year's Resolution you can all watch me prove unable to keep is that I've decided to pay a lot less attention to the Bill Cosby cases — and to remind myself that we're talking cases, plural. I dunno if a jury is ever going to say with any finality that Cosby is a rapist but it does seem to me like the guy's going to spend the next few years in and out of courtrooms, doing nothing else but fighting to stay outta prison and to not have to pay huge, guilt-establishing sums to ladies he wronged.
I would expect him to just get sicker and sicker, at least for our benefit and maybe even in reality. It's got to be pretty miserable and depressing in his house, no matter how this thing turns out. I think people who are concerned that there will not be justice for his misdeeds are missing one entire kind of justice that's already occurring.
Justice comes in two varieties: The kind you get (sometimes) in court and the kind you get (again, sometimes) in life. Skilled lawyering may be able to minimize the first kind in these cases but I don't see any way Bill Cosby gets back his legacy, reputation, career and perhaps the majority of the estimated $400 million bucks he was recently worth. That fortune is going away even as you read this. Nor is he likely to recover any kind of stability and peace in his life, plus there's whatever this whole thing is doing to his health. I sure couldn't sleep at night if I had a tenth of his problems.
It would be great to see our court system establish the truth in a way most people could accept as valid…but the other kind of justice is not nothing and it has already spoken. The punishment phase of that kind isn't over yet and won't be for the rest of that man's life.
I could waste a lot of mine following this story and I'll surely wind up regretting how much attention I pay to it. I already regret how much I once gave to reading books and watching specials about the O.J. Simpson cases…and for that matter, the Kennedy Assassination and a few others. It was not time entirely wasted. I did learn a lot about human nature and about the human capacity to jump to wrong conclusions and to deny evidence…but I could have learned all that without becoming so fixated on absorbing every available detail.
You'll probably see posts here about Cosby because I write about most of what's on my mind and I won't be able to completely turn away from the trainwreck that was once one of the world's great comedians. But you'll see less of it than you would have had I not made this resolution. And that's not a promise to you. It's a promise to me.