MANSFIELD: Defending Bill Cosby

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No, no! I’m not defending Bill Cosby. However, in spite of mounting — and virtually irrefutable — evidence of sexual misconduct that crosses the line into criminality, the once famed and now disgraced comic has a coterie of seemingly blind, dedicated defenders. The question is: Why?

The answer probably is as myriad as the defenders themselves, but I’m beginning to suspect one reason — for the males in particular who defend him — is that they actually wish they could be like Bill. They’re as sexually twisted as Cosby seems to be, and therefore admire how such an alleged pervert was able to pull his sexual scams off for close to half a century.

They view him as a hero of the depraved, and all you have to do is open the newspaper or go online any day to realize that Cosby has a vast constituency of sick motherfuckers. Our prisons are full of perverts.

Cosby certainly isn’t the first person blessed with fame and fortune to have what seems like a dark — Jekyll & Hyde — side to his personality. History is replete and littered with such monsters. However, with that said, few of them have taken such a headlong plunge from such a high altitude of grace, especially while they were still alive.

This is a man who once had it all — and then some.

Seemingly, his prominence, power and position in the oft-times decadent world of show business would have allowed Cosby to have his pick of women who would have willing participated in sex with him. But no, doggie style wasn’t good enough for him. He seeming had (or has) a form of sexual sickness that borders on necrophilia. While he didn’t want to have sex with dead women, he — if the dozens of reports are true — wanted them to at least be comatose, or close to it. Perhaps in that manner they could not later comment on his lack of sexual prowess.

Years ago I lived in Los Angeles on and off for over a decade while pursuing varied nefarious activities. While there I did business with some dudes that had this little side scam. They pooled their money and rented a small office off of Sunset Boulevard (it didn’t cost more than $500 per month back then) and put a sign on the door stating the two-room cubicle was a production company. They then would place casting calls ads in the movie trade papers, looking for “buxom beauties” as one of them stated.

They literally had women lined up in the hallway, eagerly awaiting their shot at fame and fortune … and they would do anything — and I do mean anything— to get their shot at stardom. What you need to realize is that for every “star,” there are thousands of no-talent wannabes roaming the streets of Los Angeles, eager to please. And Cosby had to know this.

One of these pieces of scum invited me to participate in their little charade, but all I felt after witnessing it in action was total revulsion. It was the moral equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, except these were human beings. While I certainly was no saint back in the day, participating in this little pussy scheme would have (in my mind) placed me on one of the lowest levels of Dante’s Inferno. I later would discover they weren’t the only dirtbags who had similar “production companies” set up around Hollywood.

These were guys who were such losers they couldn’t have gotten laid in a whorehouse with a fist full of fifties. Nonetheless, to my everlasting shame, I simply held my nose, ignored their little scheme and continued to do other moneymaking business with them.

Of course, not all of Cosby’s supporters are as sexually demented as he is reportedly is. Some have other logics for their support: He was their surrogate dad when they were growing up; women sometimes lie (it happened to me once, when a woman falsely accused me of rape); or maybe they just love Jell-O — who knows? Indeed, Michael Jackson — even in death — still has hordes of folks who staunchly maintain his innocence. Go figure.

But my personal beef with Crosby predates the sexually allegations. When he became the national scold, railing against the negative behavior of poor and disenfranchised black folk, I began to detest the man immensely.

Certainly a certain percentage of blacks are engaging in the dead-end behaviors that Cosby was so vocal in regards to pointing out … and yes: I too feel a degree of frustration with some of the antics of the underclass. What sane, caring person doesn’t?

But Bill Cosby never once referenced the brutal conditions blacks have suffered through since the first slave ship arrived on these shores in 1619. Nor did he ever take America to task for freeing four million slaves and then virtually abandoning them to the vicissitudes of fate, chance and lynching, often at the hands of brutal former slave owners who felt as if they had been robbed of their rightful property.

Cosby was keen to posit that something is wrong with us (and even to hint at genetics, as if some black folk are hard-wired, predisposed to engage in criminogenic behaviors), but my position is that nothing is wrong with us; instead, that something was done to us.

And, yeah, I know who did it and how — and so does Bill Cosby.

But since the members of the largely white audiences that flocked to see him were the progeny of some of the folks who perpetrated one of the worst holocausts in the history of mankind, he wasn’t about to criticize them. And he also knew that by attacking blacks, he would continue to fill the seats in auditoriums wherever he preformed in the twilight of his career.

Clever. Diabolical … but clever nonetheless.

I will give Bill Cosby this much: Neither he or his legal team has yet to play the race card; they’ve haven’t — as yet, anyway — claimed that the cascade of charges against the former icon is racially inspired. But as more and more skeletons continue to tumble out of the closet, they just might.

I never thought I’d take glee in engaging in schadenfreude, but I have to admit I’m enjoying every moment of Bill Cosby’s descent. If only half of the charges against him are true, there’s a special place in Hell for him, and the sooner he goes there the better.

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From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

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2 Responses to “MANSFIELD: Defending Bill Cosby”

  1. James E. Haynes

    Brother Mansfield, unlike probably a great number of our folk, I take no relish in dumping on Bill Cosby. A scripture from the Holy Bible admonishes us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. While some of us have had our measures of successes, as well as losses, we were able to land on our feet, and move on with our lives. As one of the least of HIS CHILDREN, I, sir, am not afforded the luxury of dumping on Bill Cosby, for I am assured thru thru scriptures that neither height nor depth shall separate me from the love of Jesus Christ our Savior. No one else I know of has donated to Spelman and other Colleges ,funding at the level Cosby did. It is ever so easy to point the finger and criticize others, but how many of us have walked in their shoes? Brother Mansfield, I rest my case.
    Best regards,

    Jim

  2. Richard Andrews

    @Linda James. BIll Cosby has embarrassed himself and his wife. That’s about it on the embarassment tip. He doesn’t, couldn’t and never has spoken for or represented the black population, even when he was at his zenith, and certainly not at his [hopeful?] nadir. The days are long gone when one person could represent such a diverse group of 40+ million people.

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