foolishness and obsolescence

     A good article to read, to learn about Bill Cosby's career, as well as his current legal troubles, is in the Los Angeles Times.

     Title --

Bill Cosby:  A 50-year chronicle of accusations and accomplishments

     You can read it on the Internet.


Highlights of Cosby's work:

~~  stand-up comedy, live and on record albums

~~  "I Spy"    TV series in the 1960s

~~  "The Cosby Show"    TV series in the 1980s

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     Memory can be tricky:  I used to think my earliest memory of Bill Cosby was seeing the cover of a vinyl record album of his comedy that my dad borrowed from the public library.  I seem to remember considering the names "Bill Cosby" and "Bing Crosby" -- same initials; similar last names, but not the same....  I seem to remember this album hanging out near the piano in our home across Highway 44 from the church, in Rootstown, Ohio.  

And the picture my memory gives me is Cosby standing on a skateboard.

     But on the whole Internet I cannot find a picture like that.  And I think they have all his record album covers up there.  So I am now thinking that the Wonderfulness album cover must be the photo I'm recalling.

     Not so much standing up, as sitting and leaning back; and not a skateboard, but a go-cart.  
     (Did my brain subconsciously transpose the go-cart into a skateboard because that was the one I was allowed to have?...)

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     Another article to read is titled

"Donald Trump Is Saving Our Democracy."

Written by Frank Rich, it appeared in New York Magazine on September 20, 2015.

     The title is not to be taken too literally:  the article isn't praising Donald Trump.  But it makes some other points which are interesting and worth considering.  It's also interesting because it was written in 2015, and the author thinks, as he's writing, that there is no chance for Trump to win the election.

     (Yeah.)


-------------------------- [excerpt / Frank Rich, NYMagazine] --------------------------- As the summer of Donald Trump came to its end -- and the prospect of a springtime for Trump no longer seemed like a gag -- the quest to explain the billionaire's runaway clown car went into overdrive.  How could a crass, bigoted bully with a narcissistic-personality disorder and policy views bordering on gibberish "defy political gravity," dominate the national stage, make monkeys out of pundits and pollsters, and pose an existential threat to one of America's two major parties?

     Of course, it was the news media's fault:  The Washington Post charted the correlation between Trump's national polling numbers and his disproportionate press coverage.  Or maybe the public was to blame:  Op-ed writers dusted off their sermons about Americans' childish infatuation with celebrities and reality television.  

Or perhaps Trump was just the GOP's answer to the "outsider" Bernie Sanders -- even though Sanders, unlike Trump, has a coherent ideology and has spent nearly a quarter-century of his so-called outsider's career in Congress.  

Still others riffled through historical precedents, from the third-party run of the cranky billionaire Ross Perot back to Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, the radio-savvy populist demagogues of the Great Depression.  Or might Trump be the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy (per the Times' Thomas Friedman), Hugo Chavez (the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens), or that avatar of white-racist resentment, George Wallace

 (George Will)?  The historian Richard Hofstadter's Goldwater-era essay on "the paranoid style" in American politics was once again in vogue.

     In the midst of all the hand-wringing from conservatives and liberals alike, Politico convened a panel of historians to adjudicate.  Two authoritative chroniclers of 20th-century American populism and race, Alan Brinkley of Columbia and David Blight of Yale, dismissed the parallels.  Brinkley, the author of the definitive book on Long

 and Coughlin 

(Voices of Protest), said Trump was a first in American politics, a presidential candidate with no "belief system other than the certainty that anything he says is right."  Blight said Trump's "real antecedents are in Mark Twain" -- in other words, fictional characters, and funny ones.


     There is indeed a lighter way to look at Trump's rise and his impact on the country.  Far from being an apocalyptic harbinger of the end-times, it's possible that his buffoonery poses no lasting danger.  Quite the contrary:  His unexpected monopoly of center stage may well be the best thing to happen to our politics since the arrival of Barack Obama.

     In the short time since Trump declared his candidacy, he has performed a public service by exposing, however crudely and at times inadvertently, the posturings of both the Republicans and the Democrats and the foolishness and obsolescence of much of the political culture they share.

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