Bill Cosby and the Mysteries of Jell-O

"When a product is perfectly matched to its seller, you cannot tell which thing you are being sold." - Anonymous.

Jell-O was always a mystery to me growing up. What held it together? Why did it wiggle and how come other foods were not nearly as shiny and fun.

Well, Bill Cosby's indictment, trial and conviction forced me to not only deal with the nightmarish revelations of over 50 women, it also caused me to finally find out what the hell Jell-O is.

Jell-O is gelatin and gelatin is: animal bones and skin ground up, treated with acid, then boiled. The top layer of gelatin is skimmed off the surface. Flavored and colored water fills in the spaces between the polymer chains and in that state, making it jiggly, shiny, fun and desirable.

But if you heat the Jell-O, you break the bonds that hold the proteins together and it becomes what it once was, an animal's dead carcass.

Bill Cosby was convicted. The heat was applied and now he was sent to prison, a convicted felon. The bonds holding together his image were broken and turned his legacy back into skin and bone. And even though the conviction has been overturned, no matter how we celebrate Cosby's life and career, there will always be a discussion of this rape conviction, which makes his whole life's work look like dead meat.

The conviction cast a spell on the life and work of Bill Cosby and forces the imagination to recast him in our memories: 

Chet Kincaid, the impossibly positive and helpful physical education teacher of the first Bill Cosby Show, can now be seen lusting after young school girls and cute teachers in that Los Angeles high school, spiking their milk cartons in the lunch room and their coffees in the teacher's lounge and doing unspeakable things in a janitor's closet. This is an after school special made of nightmares

Alexander Scott the intrepid tennis pro of I Spy is fighting the Cold War, but also date-raping women across Europe, leaving dazed and confused heiresses and the occasional countess in hotel rooms, groggy and unable to remember what happened to them.

And of course, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable is not just a dad and physician, but a skillful predator who uses that cover to assault women throughout New York in his OBGYN office, while raising his kids with jokes.

And in reality, we had Bill Cosby the man, the handsome, lovable, intelligent icon, a man who stood tall from the oppression of Jim Crow and rode the new racial enlightenment as an example of hard work, talent and perseverance. And now we are told that all during that glorious journey, he was drugging and raping women in a constant pattern and in numbers that were consistent with his famous work ethic. If Bill Cosby was a brilliant entertainer, athlete and scholar, why would he be any less talented a predator?

And so the time for speculation is over. Now those who support him have to go from "just allegations" to "the fix was in," "the white man," "illuminati" etc.,. 

None of this should surprise us because Cosby and Jell-O were a perfect match. Really, wasn't there always something creepy about Jell-O? I mean, it moved like it was alive and then you ate it while it was still shaking on your spoon. Not cool, man, as Chet Kincaid might say.

And now as we look back on the Cosby family, we see a tragedy as deep and immense as that of the Kennedys or the Rockefellers. Bill Cosby has buried two of his five children, and has been embroiled in fraud, extortion and other legal troubles, assault allegations and now, a rape conviction. There is a blight on him and like Joe Kennedy who died at 81 and John D. Rockefeller who died at 97, Bill Cosby has built a fortune and lived into old age, only to watch his family and good name burned to ash.

I do not know how Bill Cosby will live. He's 85 years old and the clock is ticking hard on him. He may not live long enough to redeem his name. But one thing is sure.  

Jell-O is no longer a mystery to me.

And neither is Bill Cosby. 

copyright 2018.

THE COWBOY'S REVENGE

The American cowboy is back with a vengeance, just as manliness is taking a beating.

My father loved a show called Gunsmoke, which was for a long time, the longest-running show on TV.  My cowboys were violent and ruthless. They didn't wait to shoot a bad guy and damned sure wasn't interested in taking him to prison like  Sergio Leon's Man With No Name Django and Trinity.

The cowboy disappeared for a long time until Clint Eastwood (who played the Man With No Name) brought them back with the oscar winner, Unforgiven. Then slowly, the cowboy returned to  films like Tombstone, Wyatt Earp and The Cowboy Way.

In the meantime, the moral ambivalence in our TV heroes had changed into full-out villainy. The TV show The Shield was a game-changer for TV cops. It's hero was a dirty cop whose morality was as fragile as the tin star he wore. Don't get me wrong, The Shield is a great show because it contained good men and women who were cops but it brilliantly focused on a man whose morality was a reflection of a society whole values had changed. At the same time, the cops and hoods in The Wire raised this theme to cinematic poetry.

But now there are some new sheriffs in town.

Justified's Raylan Givens, Hell on Wheels', Cullen Bohannon, Django and Longmire's Walt Longmire all have the best of the old and the new.  The are strong, kind, moral and take no shit.  But they also understand society's river of darkness and how their job navigates it. And whenever they need to, they will dip into those waters and then--look out.

In stark contrast to the many anti-heroes on TV, you know, the vampires, werewolves, serial killers, drug dealers and dirty cops, the millennial cowboys echo John Wayne, Gary Cooper as well as Vic Mackey and The Man With No Name.

And judging from the previews of the new Lone Ranger movie, the man behind the mask is out for revenge and bringing hell with him.

And the cowboy has come back just in time to slow the decline of masculinity we are now seeing in American culture.

In the western-themed movie, No Country For Old Men, Tommie Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Bell gives this long speech about dreams he had of his father, telling us that his kind, the hero, is going to pass on, leaving us with the psychopath Anton Chighur are our new alpha male.

I think the new cowboys in that picture above would disagree with that.

And so would I.