Bill Cosby has balls THIS BIG

Family entertainer Bill Cosby has come out of the closet as a social critic and activist. This is from an AP story currently moving on the subject:

WASHINGTON - Comedian Bill Cosby told a forum on family and education that African Americans should be proactive and fix their own communities.

"I have a problem with people sitting there and saying God and Jesus will find a way," Cosby said Tuesday night.

Cosby joined a panel discussion of local agency officials and other experts, called a "Call Out with Bill Cosby," on issues facing low-income Americans and took questions from the audience during two sessions, one to help foster parents and grandparents who are rearing children and the other geared toward the general public.

Basically, Cosby is going into some of the roughest neighborhoods in the country and speaking truth to the powerless in an effort to empower them. This is not some dog and pony show to promote his latest book project or TV show - he's putting his ass and his career on the line for something that promises to do nothing for his bottom line but risk imperiling it.

One has to think that the loss of his only son's life to random street violence a few years ago has something to do with his current round of activism. I remember at the time Cosby describing his son Ennis as his hero. His foundation is called Hello Friend.org, after the young Cosby's customary greeting.

Bill Cosby has been a part of my life since I was a young boy.

I grew up with “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” on Saturday mornings (“…music and fun and if you're not careful, you just might learn something before we're done!”), but that wasn't where I 'discovered' Cosby.

I fell in love with Cosby on his early comedy albums, where he talked about family and commonplace events with such wit and warmth and empathy that the fact that his characters happened to be black was lost on young Fang. His bit about driving in San Francisco still lives in a special place in my memory, not to mention “Chocolate Cake For Breakfast” and the Noah's Ark skit. Brilliant, accessible, observational stuff. And all squeaky-clean, although at the time that didn't occur to me.

Not until my mother overheard me listening to a George Carlin album did I appreciate the care Cosby took crafting his routines for a family audience without losing any of their bite. (The offending Carlin gag involved the juxtaposition of sex, religion and the venerable hymn “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”)

It turns out that behind the scenes, Cosby's been a social critic for years. Eddie Murphy did a routine decades ago about how, after Murphy first rose to popularity, he received a phone call from Cosby excoriating him for his profanity. Richard Pryor allegedly advised Murphy to suggest Cosby “have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.”

The '80s weren't great for Cosby creatively, although they set him up financially for life. I didn't care for “The Cosby Show.” If it had been a sitcom built around a family of white characters who were that bland, I wouldn't have watched it either. Even then, though, Cosby was sending a social message: Black people with comfortable lives are every bit as boring as white people with comfortable lives. By the '80s, the lesson was that, finally, enough cash would buy you social parity. “The Jeffersons” made a joke of the thesis, but “The Cosby Show” made you believe it.

And it's still true, but as has been noted elsewhere, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is flourishing again under the to-the-highest-no-bid-bidder stewardship of Team Bush.

So now Cosby's out there pointing fingers and naming names again, more in-your-face than ever before. He's drawing flack from the Left and giving the Right talking points to potentially be used against his people, but you know what? He's right. And it's not just the black community. Everywhere you look, discourse is growing more uncivil, and people are taking less personal responsibility. In America, though, it's mostly the lower-income, minority communities that are generating body counts to go along with the attendant social phenomenon.

And Cosby deserves much respect for putting his credibility, his earning power and his personal safety on the line for saying so.

Kudos to Cos!