So now I've seen all four parts of the documentary by W. Kamau Bell about you-know-who and you-know-what and the main revelation I had was that I approached it with unreal expectations…or maybe "hopes" would be a better word. I hoped it would give me some insight into a problem with which I've struggled. I hoped for an "aha!" moment when I would figure out how to deal with a conflict within my own private brain.
It's a problem based on the fact that few human beings are so overwhelmingly flawless or even overwhelmingly flawed that you can regard them wholly as one or the other. Some might get close…but even then, that may be because of what you don't know about them. Clearly for most of us, there was a time when the portrait of then-Doctor William Henry Cosby Jr. was purely a good one. Clearly too, there was a time when that became more arguable…and clearly now, there are those who would place him squarely and without hesitation in the Horrible Person category. He is hardly the only human who has undergone this change of image.
As a fan of so many things, chief among them comedians and cartoonists and comic book creators, I've formed opinions of so many people. I've gotten to know many of them, up close and personal…which means I've wrestled with a problem: How do you regard someone when 90% of what they've done is admirable and brilliant and maybe even wholly benevolent…
…and then there's that 10% that just won't go away.
Or maybe it's 80/20 or 70/30. I have no problem knowing what to think of them when there's no good and plenty of bad…but sometimes, the ratio is harder to measure. How do you quantify the good and bad? And even when, as in the case of Cosby, the bad pretty much negates the good, do you pretend the good never existed? Is it wrong to honor Cosby's accomplishments as a performer and a humanitarian and philanthropist? He was clearly a grand role model for a helluva lot of people. How much weight do we give that?
It's probably easier when the person in question raped at least sixty women — probably a lot more — because that's the kind of sin/crime that can't be spun in an innocent light. You can't say, "Well, maybe they gave consent while they were unconscious…" Some of the bad things I know other people have done are bad but not that bad.
Obviously, I'm not going to name names here but I can think of at least a dozen people I've known where the following was true: I admired them and even liked them for good things they did. Then at some point, they did bad things or I became aware of bad things. At times, I've almost envied those who, either due to naïveté or willful blindness, saw these people as All Good or All Bad. The naïve or willfully blind don't have to deal with the conflict.
I don't see how anyone could watch even one installment of We Need to Talk About Cosby, let alone all four, and not be convinced that "America's Dad" is guilty as hell, sick as hell and that it's awful that he's not still behind bars. He was not in any way exonerated by the legal decision that let him out but I guess he and his more delusional fans are more comfortable thinking he was.
My only "Aha!" moment watching the doc — the moment I learned something from it — was that there was no "Aha!" moment, nor could there ever be. We will have to always deal with The Good Cosby and The Bad Cosby as two sides of the same human being. With the folks I've known who've led to mixed feelings, those feelings will forever be mixed. Those individuals are both of those people — the one I admire and even like, just as much as they're the one who disappointed me because I'd thought they were just the first guy.
You may think that's obvious and so did I. But it was worth the four hours to realize that I wasn't missing something; that there really is no other way to deal with someone like that. And I think I also learned about why so many people had so much trouble dealing with Cosby's dual nature. I was never a huge fan of him as a performer but I sure identify with those who were in agony coming to terms with the ugly side of the man. And I can sure get angry, as anyone watching the documentary would, that he got away with as much as he did.