Depending upon who you are ethnically, how old you are, your gender, politics (if any), what country you are from, how long you have been in the USA or how old you are (again), we probably have different views on the recent sentencing of long-time comedian and actor Bill Cosby, who is eighty- one (81) years old, to prison for an alleged sexual transgression decades ago.

Bill Cosby is not my favorite comedian, but he was part of their ilk when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. I laughed harder at Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx’s bits. Yet, I even have a couple of his record albums included within my vinyl! Most notably, “To Russell, My Brother Whom I Slept With”, which has a few hilarious, timeless and memorable bits on it. He really was pretty “clean” with his humor…

That was maybe a different “Coz” than now and one who I prefer to remember, along with “Mr. Huxtable” and acting along side Sidney Poitier in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974).

I also fondly remember Bill Cosby as one of the first black American actors to be on a weekly show on NBC network TV during the sixties, “I Spy” with his partner, the late Robert Culp! It was an Oreo cookie espionage hit show not to be missed, if my parents allowed me to stay up past homework and curfew bed time. I bet Mr. Culp would be very distressed by this turn of events.

On the album, “Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…RIGHT” the bit “Noah, Me And You Lord” is one of his best classics! “A Nut In Every Car”, from the same album, is still relevant on our roads today! It is still a great album for congruent laughs.

My understanding of being incarcerated is that it is supposed to rehabilitate the offender of laws. What is Bill Cosby supposed to do in a cell at eighty-one? Jack-off (if he still can)? Contemplate his wrongs and come out a better man? Have contrition, remorse and beg forgiveness? He should have taken the stand to defend himself verbally! Shoot, the man may have dementia and not even understand why he is there! This is like…elder abuse! Surely “house arrest” with electronic monitoring was an alternative, right? No matter what you think of him or his accusers, to put him in a sterile state prison at this point in his life does not seem to rise to the level of punishment fitting the crime and I doubt he survives it for long if appeals fail.
How come the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has tens of similar accusers, isn’t in prison or on trial, by the way?

His accuser? To me looking at it or “her” (looks like a guy to me! lol), I see emotionally disturbance issues (drama) right off the bat and I hate that “Russell’s Brother” felt he had to even waste time on that. What was he thinking? Was his game so lame that he had to resort to slipping a ‘mickey’ to a chick in order to get some ‘strange” – all while having a wife and family back home? I don’t watch television anymore, but I read a headlines clip from USA Today on my android, where this individual seemed to externalize everything wrong in their life to Mr. Cosby! Duh? I believe they had diffidence issues long before the two met and maybe also should spend time in a small locked room reading a self-help book called, “Your Erroneous Zones” [Dyer].

Another part of me remember’s Bill Cosby as a militant during the civil rights protest era when we had to “overcome” segregation and racial prejudice in the USA. I’m not one to always blame things on race, however part of me thinks maybe ‘the man’ had it in for him all this time, and proves that no matter how elderly, “wealthy” or infirm you are in America, if you are a black man accused sexually by a Caucasian woman, you are likely to get no justice – still in 2018 – just a modern day lynching. And that… may be the most telling and saddest, unkind cut of all.