Unsettling Thoughts On Bill Cosby

So Bill Cosby’s a rapist.
Those are hard words for me to type: dude was one of my childhood heroes, the first comedian I really got into, and still a funny funny man.  But fifteen women have come forward to say that he drugged and violated them, which is a lot of women.  None of whom have a lot to gain in terms of money or great fame by accusing Cosby (seriously, anyone accusing anyone famous of rape goes through so much shit that it’d be an easier way to fame and fortune by robbing a bank).  Some of whom have been struggling for years to get their message heard.
It’s not a legal definition, no, but if fifteen different people came out over the years to say, “Yeah, Mister Rogers snorted cocaine with me,” I’d go “Mister Rogers snorted cocaine.”  So that makes Cosby a rapist.  (His “Spanish Fly” routine, on fantasies of drugging women into being loose enough to have sex with him, doesn’t help.  I remembered that one, as I had memorized most of Cosby’s routines as a kid, but I certainly didn’t put that one into context.)
(Though as Bart Calendar notes, “rape” is not unusual when it comes to 1960s and 1970s heroes – he’s got a list of beloved musicians who are also rapists, or, at the least, guilty of child molestation by knowingly sleeping with girls below the age of consent.  You may have to understand that all your heroes are secretly vile, which is frankly not the worst message to take away.)
Anyhow, so I was thinking the other day that fifteen women have claimed that Bill Cosby raped them.  Which means there are, likely, more: Women who have gone “Okay, it’s in the headlines now, it’s getting traction, I don’t have to make the ugly fact that I was violated by Bill Cosby the only thing people are going to know about me.”  Women who shrug “Well, that’s what happened back then, I don’t see that as bad.”  It may well be that Bill Cosby raped forty or fifty women, or perhaps even more.
Charles Manson killed nine people.
No, wait; technically Charlie didn’t kill anyone.  His followers killed nine people.  (And some kinder interpretations than mine think that it was his followers who started murdering people, and once that started Cult Leader Charlie either had to go “Wow, that’s awesome! Just what I wanted!” or probably get murdered himself in a cult uprising.  I don’t know, I only read Helter Skelter once just to be cool when I was a teenager.  And the numbers of Manson dead vary, depending on who you talk to, so I’m sure someone will correct me.  Probably Bart.)
Anyway, Charlie’s in the news because he got married – remember, folks, gay marriage is what’s destroying this sacred institution – and I had a weird thought.  Because Manson?  Killed nine people.  Cosby raped, say, thirty.
There’s a math there that I don’t want to do.
Like, seriously, if we assume that the absolute worst-case scenario about Cosby is true, and he raped hundreds of women, does that make him worse than Charlie Manson?
Leaving aside that old do-not-engage question of whether “rape” is worse than “murder” (as murder is a short end, whereas rape traumatizes the victim for decades, but I suspect most rape victims would prefer people not tell them that they’d be better off dead), you have to figure that maybe Cosby was doing deeply nefarious shit for forty years successfully.  He may have had a lot more impact.
And then I start going, “Well, Cos gave laughter to the world!  He did a hell of a lot for black-white relations at a time when there were practically no black heroes in the media!  He’s done a surprising amount of charity work, donating to the community! He’s made the world a hell of a lot of a better place, and all Manson ever did was wrote a marginal Beach Boys song!”
Then I think, “Okay, so is this an equation?  Like, if Manson cured heart disease, would the murders be just a phase we was going through?”
Then I think, “Is it about the order of revelation?  Because hey, we knew happy Jell-O eating Bill Cosby for years, we loved him, then we found out about this secret past – what if Manson was a researcher who cured AIDS in 1987, and then we discover now that whoops, he sorta killed Sharon Tate and covered it up properly?  How would we react then?  I bet there’d be a lot of talking media heads saying that Manson didn’t kill anyone directly, it was just a youthful mistake….”
And of course this whole chain of thought is fucking ridiculous.  People can do good things and bad things.  Our monkey brains want HEROES and VILLAINS and so try to figure out who’s a goodie and who’s a baddie.  And the truth is that people can contain both wonderful kind instincts and selfish harmful ones, and which one you get depends on who you happen to be.  All of our most beloved heroes have been absolute dicks at some point (well, except maybe Mister Rogers), and all of our worst villains have done something nice for someone.
But we don’t want to think that good people can do bad things.  Or that bad people can do positive ones.  We want to do Cosby Math, where we total everything up and try to see whether they’re above the level of “EVIL.”
And Cosby Math is dangerous, because we start thinking that there’s some upper end of the scale that’s completely safe.  That there are heroes who’ve done wonderful things, and of course people like them can’t do bad things, and you see that in the trail of the women who’d tried to say “Hey, Cos did this horrible thing to me” and people went “We don’t want to hear it, scrape those allegations from his biography, if you say this we’ll make you look like the villain.” And some of them went dormant for years.  When you do Cosby Math and start flipping binary switches to light up someone as “HERO,” then you actually bury evidence.
Truth is, you can have a good guy who’s got some fucking racist thoughts, you can have an anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage Pope who’s really compassionate towards the poor, you can have a really funny enlightening dude who rapes people.  You can have mixtures of all sorts of things and they don’t really add up.
We want to shuck away all the contradictory evidence, to leave us with a single image – whether that’s good or bad, we don’t really care which, we just want to not do these exhaustng calculations any more.  But people are more like one of those lenticular baseball cards, the ones that look like they’re moving if you flip them back and forth.
But in truth, that isn’t motion you’re seeing.  It’s just four or five different pictures, each similar but radically different.  Which picture you get depends what angle you’re viewing it from. And sometimes, you can’t add all the pictures together to form a satisfying whole.
And as always, apologies.  People come here to get nice neat conclusions.  I don’t have one here.  Sometimes it’s just me pointing at a mess on the floor and shrugging.