Of brown hornets and other endangered species by John Hedgecoth
Its pretty easy to keep up a thick veneer of cynicism about events of the day, especially if you're supposed to be among the sardonic scribes who report and interpret the news. Anyone who has worked in the media knows the detached cool one must adopt in order to protect one's sense of professionalism. When you're trained to react in this way, it can be difficult to work out of your system. There's a sense all of America is becoming this way, jaded to nearly every human triumph or tragedy, too myopic to celebrate life's ups and too guarded to despair at its downs.
Once in a while something punctures the veneer, though, robbing us of deniability, and if we are honest, shaking our very sense of grounding.
For me, a seemingly remote event recently provided the blunt instrument: Last month 27-year-old Ennis Cosby was murdered on a Los Angeles freeway after he got out of his car to change a tire. Details of the crime remain sketchy, including the facts surrounding a female acquaintance of Cosby arriving at the scene just as the killing took place. Whatever the circumstances, the fact remains that the son of an American icon fell victim to the senseless violence pervading our culture.
I didn't have much of a reaction at first. I thought it ironic in a terrible way that Bill Cosby, a man who had based so much of his brilliant stand-up career on the family (Is anyone not familiar with the six-foot chicken heart or the coin toss at little big horn?) had lost his son in a too-typical way. Indeed, Cosby's later forays into television including the current CBS offering seem to have as an unstated but obvious goal the encouraging of strong family units, African-American or otherwise. There was a sense that Cosby didn't deserve to have this happen to him. Not the man who wrote the best seller "Fatherhood." What a horrible epilogue for any father.
Still, something gnawed at me for days as I watched every inch of videotape and searched MSNBC's website for anything about the crime. What was it? The answer came in a television report about the funeral. The reporter referred to "Cosby's other children . . . "
Bill Cosby's children.
The Cosby Kids.
For six years in the mid-1970s, a cartoon about a group (gang?) of kids from inner-city New York crossed the airwaves into suburban homes across the country. I was among the millions who waited out the Super Friends and the possibility of seeing "Conjunction Junction" for the umpteenth time, just to get my weekly dose of Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids.
I do not exaggerate when I say there were summer Saturdays when every kid on the block would be out playing touch football or riding bikes by noon, except for me -- Fat Albert wasn't over until 12:30. Play could wait.
It didn't seem to matter that I didn't know anyone who looked like Russell, Rudy or Weird Harold. The show dealt with basic themes like thriftiness and loyalty, stuff that made sense to me. The characters ran the gamut from boy-scout types to con artists. That too, made sense to me. Mushmouth's garbled delivery is my template for mocking inarticulateness, still today. Note: it didn't matter whether the dialect was ebonics, bubonics or bionics -- Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids were universal.
When the imaginary superhero the Brown Hornet bumbled his way through everyday problems, I got the sense that I could cope too, if need be.
I didn't know it then, but Bill Cosby, both in voice and in creativity, was the driving force behind the piece of entertainment that first gave me the sense that kids were pretty much the same everywhere -- that if given the chance, we could all get through life together.
Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids were from the inner city -- not an idyllic place in their time, 20 years ago. Certainly not one now. I do not pretend to have an appreciation for how much different it is being seven years old today. I just know Bill Cosby gave me something lasting, a belief that decent people existed pretty much everywhere, and that we all could get along.
The lesson behind the most recent Cosby kids episode is that amid all our political discussion about "character" and all our preaching about second amendment rights and all the officer friendly programs in all the schools in America, the amoral forces of violence and hate are still winning out. The days of "Gonna have a good time!" are history.
I want to file that lesson away in some current events folder and pretend it doesn't affect my life, or my son's.
But Good Lord, they've killed a Cosby kid.
John Hedgecoth always thought the Cosby Kids and the Scooby Doo gang should get together for a for a big time monster hunt in the city. Unfortunately "Tales from the Hood" has been done.