Was Bill Cosby's Perp Walk Necessary?

This event was probably inevitable, but it was also probably very, very unhelpful

Yesterday’s much-heralded arrest and arraignment of Bill Cosby hopefully represents the beginning of closure for the women Cosby allegedly assaulted. But it probably represents a brief intermission in America’s media circus surrounding his trials. And just as good playwrights lead into act breaks with emotional cliffhangers, this interlude begins with images guaranteed to drag audiences back. Ushered past celebrity-chasing photojournalists by a studiously mixed-race police pair, Cosby looked every one of his 78 long years.

He also looked exactly like a stereotypical Black man getting his perp walk. With cameras packed as tightly as any Oscar Night red carpet, police shuffled Cosby within grabbing distance of ambiguously adoring crowds. Importantly, police pulled Cosby through the front door of the courthouse, an indignity not forced upon George Zimmerman or Officer Darren Wilson. About the only way yesterday’s arrest circus could’ve been more stereotyped, was if police made Cosby wear a hoodie.

Journalists have penned numerous think pieces regarding Cosby’s highly public disintegration. Will Cosby be remembered, they wonder, as a sexual predator or a comedian? Will these allegations, most outside the statute of limitations, undo Cosby’s history of fighting for African-American rights and justice? These articles have struggled to remain studiously fair to both sides; but the accompanying photographs have inevitably shown a Black man, framed head-and-shoulders by the camera, looking exactly like a mug shot.

Progressives have treated Cosby pretty badly. Wake Forest professor Melissa Harris-Perry, speaking from Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC pulpit, used Cosby’s arrest to conflate virtually everything the former America’s Favorite Dad has ever done to irritate African-American activists. And that list isn’t small. The circumstances surrounding Cosby’s arrest, which dominated half the Maddow show yesterday, opened a spigot of hardly-repressed wrath, letting Harris-Perry reprimand a massive portmanteau of social issues. Most were unrelated to the pending allegations.

Despite his contributions to resisting racial injustice, Cosby has long irked certain quarters with his “Politics of Respectability.” This although the underlying principle is one professors frequently preach to students: To Get Taken Seriously, Act Like Someone Worth Taking Seriously. Cosby has preached that African-Americans, especially young men, should avoid comporting themselves according to racial stereotypes, like saggy britches and slang. Harris-Perry, and other Black activists, have taken issue with what they consider Cosby’s assimilationism.

Nevertheless, this principle informed Cosby’s quite-long career. He took pride in ensuring his I Spy character, Alexander Scott, got presented as smart, well-spoken, and fatherly. This contrasted with then-current stereotypes in Shaft, Superfly, and other dubious blaxploitation classics. (Cosby reputedly took offence at the 2002 I Spy movie, where Eddie Murphy played a semi-literate, philandering goofball.) Cosby also guaranteed his characters in The Bill Cosby Show and The Cosby Show be clean-cut professionals with families.

This issue found itself on egregious display yesterday. Despite his button-down cardigan and varnished bamboo cane, Cosby, marched before the assembled multitudes, looked distinctly rumpled and disreputable. Were anybody from Central Casting seeking a stereotypical Creepy Neighborhood Pervert, yesterday’s footage would certainly find itself in the B-roll folder. Cosby looked scruffy, the shambling image of sexual indecency. Even if, like Michael Jackson, Cosby finds himself legally exonerated, yesterday’s images will cast a long shadow retrospectively.

Cosby’s long, lingering public disintegration has become, for America’s political Left, what Donald Trump has been for the political Right: an opportunity to vent its id publicly. Despite his demi-liberal politics, Cosby has always personally been essentially conservative, a reality that challenges the alliance between African-American leaders and the Democratic party. The lingering current of discontent between organized Black leadership in America and Bill Cosby, is finally getting the public viewing it so desperately deserves.

Bill Cosby now joins the list of public personalities whose sexual violence has become public property after their careers are essentially over. Some, like Jimmy Savile and John Howard Yoder, didn’t get exposed until after their deaths. Few have been treated badly: Savile’s name got quietly removed from his philanthropic contributions, while Yoder still retains a sizeable army of public apologists. For comparison to Cosby’s treatment, one would have to go back to Michael Jackson.

When members of disempowered minorities get busted, their failings cast shadows on their groups. Barack Obama doesn’t get judged as President or a Democrat; he’s America’s First Black President. Now Cosby has been turned into a stereotypical Black predator for the cameras. It’s hard to separate the bad treatment he’s receiving, which even banksters and convicted politicians don’t receive, from his race. And it’s hard to separate his race from our attitudes as a nation.

The Dark Knight of the Soul

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 64
Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and
Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum—A Serious House On Serious Earth

It seems difficult to believe such an iconic character was ever endangered these days, but during the 1970s, sales of Batman comics slumped so low, the character faced cancellation. But following the DC Comics’ still-controversial 1985 reboot of their narrative continuum, the publisher began experimenting with the character’s moral and psychological implications. Two long storylines paved popular attention to Batman before Tim Burton’s popular 1989 movie: 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns and 1989’s Arkham Asylum.

Immediately following DC’s reboot, writer-artist Frank Miller, already an over-ten-year comics veteran, decided to relaunch Batman retrospectively. He depicts Bruce Wayne, aged and retired, sharing liquor and reminiscing with Commissioner Gordon. But in Batman’s absence, Gotham’s crime has returned. Flippant muggers leave Wayne bleeding on a sidewalk, reawakening an old man’s deeply buried hunger. Batman returns to a world no longer prepared for him, a world torn between violent street gangs and an autocratic government.

Batman’s return precipitates greater consequences. Deep inside Arkham, Two-Face and the Joker have convalesced for a decade. Modern medicine restores Harvey Dent’s face, but he believes himself now completely scarred. No longer burdened with black-and-white morality, his newfound nihilism plunges Gotham into blood. But Dent has nothing on the Joker. Catatonic for ten years, he regains consciousness upon glimpsing Batman. (Miller precedes by two years Alan Moore’s hypothesis that Batman and Joker need one another.)

These events unfold against a background of extreme transnational violence. Miller presents a stark world, a reductio ad absurdum of 1980s moral absolutes. America has recruited some superheroes as government agents, and driven others underground. Superman takes orders from a President Reagan grown gnarled from power, but his thought bubbles reveal he despises collaborating with fascist warmongering. A maimed fugitive Green Arrow, meanwhile, proves Batman’s greatest ally and connection to the growing, organized anti-statist resistance.

Where Miller’s sweeping, epic-scale novel reflects his long publishing history, Grant Morrison hit audiences largely unawares. His story is largely intimate, circumscribed in both geography and time. To quell a prisoners’ riot in Gotham’s notorious Arkham Asylum, Batman acquiesces to an elaborate hide-and-seek game inside the building’s historic walls. His encounters with decrepit inmates provide insights into Batman’s own fractured, delusional psyche. He cannot know, however, that his circumstances mirror the Asylum’s own eerie history.

Miller’s massive political saga seems worlds removed from Morrison’s claustrophobic psychological thriller. Morrison traps Batman inside the world he’s created for his greatest enemies, letting them re-inflict the horrors he previously exacted upon them. As Batman travels deeper into the asylum (Bruce Wayne makes only salutary appearances in this story), the inmates force him to confront his own unresolved traumas. Morrison implies that Gotham only controls its native lunatics by employing an even greater lunatic.

Dave McKean's nightmarish, profoundly influential depictions of Batman and the Joker

In parallel to Batman’s ordeal, we receive glimpses into asylum founder Amadeus Arkham’s own horrific descent. The name Amadeus means “love of God,” while Arkham comes from H.P. Lovecraft. Dr. Arkham begins as a devoted son and becomes a dedicated psychiatrist, mentored by Carl Jung himself. But his own dark history, entombed deep inside himself, returns to visit, costing him everything he loves. Without ever making the choice, Arkham becomes a vigilante killer… and inmate.

Besides their divergent story structures, these novels have wildly different looks. Frank Miller does his own rough art, and his thick, deeply-carved lines make an austere background for colorist Lynn Varley’s surprisingly lush but controlled watercolors. The smeared color over inflexible outlines reflects Miller’s late Cold War milieu. Morrison wrote his script in collaboration with artist Dave McKean, whose watercolors, photocollages, and groundbreaking digital art presage 1990s graphic storytelling, while emphasizing Morrison’s dense psychological insights.

Despite their far-reaching influence on Batman mythology, and comics generally, one mustn’t mistake these stories for twinsies. Miller expands Batman’s impact by stressing his channeled criminal impulses, the reality of Batman as champion of order, but not necessarily law. Morrison, by contrast, says Batman saves others by failing to address himself. Miller’s political novel, and Morrison’s psychological horror, explore Batman from without and within. They provide a channel through which all subsequent comic storytelling flows.

These novels are inarguably products of their time. Written as America’s crime statistics hit their all-time peak, and society threatened its own nuclear armageddon, they reflect the nihilistic philosophy underlying Reagan’s Morning in America. Like The Terminator or Red Storm Rising, they wouldn’t be written today. But the world we inhabit today wouldn’t exist without their having been written. We’ve ascended from the bleak world these novels describe, but their cynical influence lingers, waiting. Patiently.

The Politics of Christmas

In the days preceding Christmas this year, my Facebook feed has been cluttered with remarkably repetitive stories: promises to explain the political implications of “I Saw Three Ships,” “Do You Hear What I Hear,” “Good King Wenceslas,” and other Yuletide standards. Every Christmas seems characterized by some overwhelming theme. This year, apparently, it’s that Christmas traditions have political significance. Somehow, despite the weight of history, this always surprises people.

At the risk of sounding like my dad, we’ve arguably forgotten the meaning of Christmas. I don’t mean that Santa risks displacing Baby Jesus from our attention; we’ve fought that battle relentlessly already. Rather, the strident complaints about the War on Christmas have forced liturgically conservative Christians to cede all political implications of Christmas to people whose interests couldn’t coincide less with the message contained within the Gospels.

Northrop Frye writes that Jesus’ life, as we know it, remains inseparable from prophecy. True that, but it clearly also remains inseparable from politics. From its opening passages, Jesus’ biography ballyhoos its political implications. The two birth narratives, often melded into one in twee Protestant Christmas Eve services, actually have different takes on then-contemporary politics. They agree, however, on one important point: Jesus’ birth explicitly repudiates worldly power and influence.

Luke, the better-known birth narrative, begins with Joseph and Mary displaced from their home for tax purposes. It explicitly establishes Christ’s birth amid the upheaval of a conquered people, whose lives are periodically suspended to subsidize a government that rules the land, without ever working it. Re-imagine it thus: if America required every Native American back onto The Rez for BIA bureaucratic purposes, Modern Jesus might appear in such circumstances.

Matthew, by contrast, pits Jesus’ birth against Herod the Great. A puppet king established by Rome, history records Herod’s reign as a triumph of secular splendor paid for by the impoverishment of Judea’s people. Josephus records that Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem was more spectacular than any Roman religious house. And Matthew records Herod demanding an entire generation put to sword to forestall any challenge to his worldly authority.

One could continue. Luke records pre-teen Jesus disputing the religious authorities in their temple—religious authorities whom Obery Hendricks recounts weren’t spiritual shopkeepers, but an explicitly political order established to govern a conquered people. (“Priests” are, historically, lawkeepers, not shepherds.) Matthew describes Jesus’ family exiled to Egypt, an explicit allusion to Israel’s two periods of national exile in foreign lands. Both Evangelists record differing, but explicitly political, early Messianic childhoods.

This thread continues into Jesus’ ministry. Traditional liturgy loves emphasizing how Jesus called His apostles from among fishers, farmers, and other uneducated poor. The apostles’ lack of theological training is certainly significant. But equally important, Jesus called His apostles from Galilee, from people nominally Jewish, but who, through geographical inconvenience, couldn’t participate in standard Temple ritual. Jesus’ apostles weren’t merely unschooled and penniless; they were impious, despised, and possibly apostates.

Jesus seldom spoke against Roman occupation. He demanded believers “render unto Caesar” (itself a loaded story), and even healed a Centurion’s beloved servant. However, Jesus reserved His greatest wrath for Pharisees and Sadducees. Not because He opposed religious authority, as some suppose—He engaged modest, curious religious like Nicodemus in Socratic give-and-take eagerly. Rather, He opposed religious leaders because they derived their power from maintaining the status quo like Quislings.

Even His death has political implications. Douglas Adams famously claimed Jesus “had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.” But be serious: empires don’t nail hairy provincial preachers to timbers and stake them up to die in the municipal landfill for telling people to pray more. Temple authorities demanded Jesus’ death, and Pilate capitulated, because He threatened their dominion.

Though theologians across time have debated exactly why Jesus needed to die, one thread remains constant: human authority found Him dangerous. He preached against wealth, dominance, and power. He forgave sinful women while condemning lustful men. He healed and redeemed Samaritans, while chasing Jews from their Temple. He literally hugged lepers. He established power relationships exactly opposite those this world favors. Jesus’ life was wholly, explicitly political.

Catholic author (and sometime conservative mouthpiece) Garry Wills writes that “Jesus did not come to bring any form of politics.” True enough, if by “politics” we mean partisan alignments. Jesus doesn’t endorse any political party, notwithstanding both American parties’ recent eagerness to enlist His membership. But Jesus clearly had strong positions on human relationship to power. Christians need to examine this closely. Human governments can’t get us into Heaven.

Schoolhouse Block—the Movie

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Three
Mike Million (director), Tenure

Professor Charlie Thurber (Luke Wilson) loves teaching, and his students love him back, some a little more than they probably should. But he hates academia's competitive paper chase. After being passed over for tenure once too often, he decides to knuckle down and join the game at bucolic Grey College. But a screw-loose colleague, a sexy competitor, and family pressures may be more than a loyal English professor can bear.

This straight-to-DVD gem will probably never get the recognition it deserves. PR people can't compress its concept into a plug line. Its gentle, optimistic tone defies hip cinematic cynicism. And its low-key humor, based on characters and language rather than broad physical comedy, will never rake in the big bucks. Yet I can't help but love this film, possibly because I see myself and my colleagues here on screen.

As Grey College’s only non-tenured English instructor, Charlie assumes a new full professorship is his for the asking. Until the department hires Elaine Grasso (Gretchen Mol), formerly of Harvard, a well-published but awkward wunderkind, to sweeten the competition. Charlie, a gifted teacher, sports a brief CV, because “publish or perish” passed him by. But with job security and pay on the line, he becomes painfully aware of academic politics.

At the other extreme, comedian David Koechner (Anchorman, The Office) plays Charlie’s best friend Jay. A chronic loser and academic outcast himself, he apparently exists to offer appalling advice. Urging Charlie into numerous adolescent stunts and theatrical displays, he definitely increases Charlie’s visibility before the tenure committee. But Charlie quickly questions whether succeeding at the cost of his integrity really accomplishes anything.

Anybody who’s studied, or taught, university-level liberal arts recently will recognize Charlie’s fundamental struggles. For three generations, America saw investment in higher education as not merely a moral good, but a tool for fighting the Cold War. Since the middle 1990s, however, willingness to subsidize education has plummeted. Administrative patronage plums have mushroomed, while classroom budgets have cratered. Fiercer competition for fewer jobs has become SOP in academia.

Luke Wilson (left) and Gretchen Mol

But this story isn’t exclusively for scholastic types. Anyone who’s felt the frustration of today’s widening gap between work and reward will recognize this story. Charlie desperately wants, not fame nor recognition, but security enough to do his job the best way possible. Glimpses of his classroom technique and his students’ undisguised respect prove he’s proficient. Yet somehow, in today’s go-go economy, doing a good job isn’t good enough anymore.

This movie’s shoestring production permits a design edge missing from many recent Hollywood spectacles. Shot for $5 million, it uses existing locations, like historic Bryn Mawr College, to give the production an authentically bygone texture. Without expensive music or digital effects, the producers rely upon genuine performances and careful mood to hook audiences. It’s odd, and appealing, to watch a film without having our senses shocked or our emotions manipulated.

I especially respect writer-director Mike Million’s rejection of hip conventional screenwriting techniques. In a movie marketplace dominated by Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, we’ve become jaded on over-high stakes, cascading tragedies, and three-act structures. Million’s picaresque storytelling, about a schlubby everyman who wants to do a good job well, makes an engaging change. This movie offers few focus-tested surprises, preferring to offer engaging characters in a smart situation.

And thankfully Million avoids the most obvious trap: he doesn’t force Charlie and Elaine into bed. Throughout the movie, they develop mutual respect, even friendship, that complicates Charlie’s desire to subvert her career. Toward the end, they imply the possibility of possible future courtship. But essentially, their relationship is a realistic depiction of professional competition between two smart people who happen to be opposite sex.

Wilson plays Charlie so he has our sympathy, but doesn't need our pity. He excels at what he does, and students seek his help because he's a good teacher. But being good isn't good enough anymore. Anybody who's ever postponed grading or given students just enough to get by while hammering on our own scholarship to show the department we deserve to exist, will recognize Charlie as one of our own.

And this movie doesn't jump out waving jazz hands to convince us we ought to laugh. Despite a few exaggerated moments, it mainly displays an understated quality that shows its audience a level of respect we've grown unaccustomed to recently. If more movies like this emerged from mainstream Hollywood dream factories, Sunset Strip might have fewer zillionaires, but the movies would still be something to look forward to.

Is It Okay to Hate the Rich Yet?

Serial CEO Martin Shkreli would like to be known as a master
strategist. In fairness, lying and theft really are strategies.

Last spring, self-described “media manipulator” Ryan Holiday released his second book, The Obstacle Is the Way. This attempted updating of classical Stoic philosophy annoyed me from chapter one, when Holiday appropriated robber baron John D. Rockefeller to exemplify applied Stoicism. Rockefeller used many unethical or illegal practices, including predatory pricing to submarine competitors, union-busting to keep desperate workers underpaid, and dumping sludge into rivers.

Nevertheless, Holiday praises Rockefeller’s purported Stoic qualities. In my favorite example, Holiday extols Rockefeller’s immunity to outrage: “He could not be rattled… not even by federal prosecutors (for whom he was a notoriously difficult witness to cross-examine…).” Wait, Rockefeller got prosecuted? For crimes history now considers established fact? Holiday never blinks at this. Rockefeller’s inability to get upset sounds less like Stoicism than diagnosable psychopathy.

Bill Gates

I noted this inconsistency in my review. History believes John D. Rockefeller’s foremost philosophical standpoint was John D. Rockefeller. Nevertheless, Holiday’s encomium to wealthy privilege received multiple defenders, including this gem, dated September 2015:

For all your moaning, Rockefeller was not perfect, but in the end he did more good than bad. He sure wasn't a criminal, he gave to charity by the time he was 16, and he helped medical science very concretely, you half-baked sod

I recalled this naked bullshittery last week, when two news items crossed my desk simultaneously. First, notorious “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, who achieved notoriety when he jacked life-saving drug prices over five thousand percent, got arrested for playing three-card monte to conceal massive corporate losses. Then, uncovered papers reveal how Google, among Earth’s largest corporations, spread money like margarine to make European antitrust cases go away.

Separately, these stories make chilling but ultimately disconnected anecdotes. But patterns accumulate: Microsoft’s late-Nineties antitrust case mysteriously vanished when George W. Bush, Bill Gates’ largest campaign contribution recipient, became President. Many Bush Administration appointees resented having to divest lucrative Enron shares, until Enron’s numbers proved founded on lies (see Greg Palast). JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon lauded his personal virtue in avoiding the 2007 banking collapse, before regulators zapped him for multiple market violations.

The chilling circumstantial evidence becomes difficult to avoid: one cannot become exceedingly rich in America without blithe disregard for ethics, rule of law, or the value of human life.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not discussing what I consider “the ordinary rich.” I’ve known people who become rich by local standards because they provide valuable products or services: the software developer, the craft brewmaster, the restaurateur. I respect these people because their wealth derives from, and ultimately returns to, the community that built them. No, I’m discussing financial superstars who become so massive that, like literal stars, their mere presence bends light, space, and the value of a buck.

Martin Shkreli, son of immigrants, successfully flipped money to become richer at twenty, than most people who offer services or build things become throughout their lifetimes. Fine, he has valuable skills. He arguably generated capital for young businesses and striving entrepreneurs. But evidence shows he started multiple companies partly to shuffle money and create the illusion of more value than actually existed.

Marcus Aurelius

Google has flourished partly by purchasing every possible service available. They own YouTube, Boston Dynamics, Zagat, and other services you use daily. (They also own my blog platform; I’m arguably biting the hand that feeds.) But they’ve gained their highest revenues not from services they provide ordinary customers; their largest revenue engine entails packaging our usage data and reselling it to corporations. Anybody’s guess who owns your last porn search.

And yes, sometimes the exceedingly rich give to charity. John Rockefeller gave liberally, as does Bill Gates, a century later. So do I. But nobody praises me for giving from my limited store (Mark 12:44). Rockefeller and Gates became very, very rich, at least partly through theft, then returned some fraction of their proceeds to the common good. If bank robbers put change in the Salvation Army kettle, is anybody particularly impressed?

As my pseudonymous critic notes, nobody’s perfect. Even Marcus Aurelius, probably the most famous voice of classic Stoicism, needed to compartmentalize his life. His Meditations, among my favorite books, notably never mentions his military campaigns to suppress insurgency among conquered peoples, nor his defense of borders with Donald Trump-like zeal. We’re all only human.

It’s human nature to admire the wealthy, the glamorous, and the pretty. But criminals are not to be admired. And, capitalist myths notwithstanding, let’s acknowledge: it’s hard to get very, very rich in America without callously disregarding the law.