Michael Dyson: Why Bill Cosby Is an Idiot. A Fisking.

We promised you two pieces from the Post today. Our previous post discussed a writer who seemed merely clueless. This one addresses the absolute inability of the intelligentsia to take a black man seriously when he strays from Marxist class-struggle orthodoxy. The piece, by a University of Pennsylvania Nutty Professor named Michael Dyson, uses Bill Cosby's latest anti-poverty crusade as canon fodder to promote the prof's own book, "Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?"—a tome whose insulting title is a two-sentence abstract of its insulting and slanderous contents. (And which book, of course, copped the 2006 NAACP Image Award, an honor, we're sure, no conservative book has ever won.)

Dyson takes umbrage at Bill Cosby's long-running crusade to get black communities to face up to their own responsibilities in a new century where the "blame whitey" argument has begun to wear awfully thin. But right from the outset, Dyson smears Cosby before the comedian-educator can get out of his corner:

Ever since he battered poor blacks two years ago in his infamous remarks on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education , Bill Cosby has been taking to the road to spread his bitter gospel to all who will listen. In rigged town-hall meetings, Cosby assembles community folk and experts who agree with his take on black poverty: that it's the fault of the poor themselves.

Note in this opening the classic tactic of a Stalinist in writing or in speech. Smear your opponent with allegations of evildoing and negative code words be fore your opponent can get out of the corner, diminishing your opponent to the point where no one could possibly take what he or she says seriously. Note all the negative and disparaging phrases above, a classic example of this pugilistic, class-struggle approach. These people never deviate their script, as it's worked for them in most venues for nearly a century. (BTW, we've italicized these phrases for your convenience, and will continue to do so throughout this piece.)

Now that Dyson has cold-cocked his opponent with this classic, showtrial tactic, he condescendingly describes the objects of Cosby's crusade, some of whom are actually dumb enough to agree with Cos and disagree with "intellectuals" like Dyson:

It's often difficult to point out just how harmful that sentiment is, because most black folk do believe strongly in taking their destiny into their own hands. They believe in hard work and moral decency. They affirm the need for education and personal discipline. When they hear Cosby say that poor black folk should go to work, stay out of jail, raise their children properly and make sure they go to school, they nod their heads in agreement.

First of all, Dyson states uniquivocally, without a shred of proof, that Cosby's "sentiment" is "harmful." Really? Where's the proof? And if "most black folk" agree with Cosby, hey, what's wrong with them? Surely they must be deluded. If so, Dyson will set them right:

But it's one thing to say that personal responsibility is crucial to our survival. It's another to pretend that it's the only thing that matters. The confusion between the two positions is what makes Cosby's blame-the-poor tour so destructive.

Interesting. We've read plenty of Cosby's remarks, and we've never seen him "pretend" that personal responsibility is "the only thing that matters." This is a construct of Dyson's imagination. And since he's a lefty, hey, he must be telling the truth, right? So I guess we'll simply have to believe his unsubstantiated characterization of Cosby's stump-speech, and also agree with his slanderous conclusion that the "blame-the-poor tour" is "so destructive." (Aside: Conservatives really have it tough in this world. They actually have to back up everything they say.)

Oh, and speaking of Conservatives, well, you know what's coming next:

By convincing poor blacks that their lot in life is purely of their own making, Cosby draws on harsh conservative ideas that overlook the big social factors that continue to reinforce poverty: dramatic shifts in the economy, low wages, chronic underemployment, job and capital flight, downsizing and outsourcing, and crumbling inner-city schools.

Cat's really out of Dyson's bag, now. Cosby has embraced, gag!, "harsh conservative ideas." Such ideas are, of course, de facto, stupid, since they "overlook the big social factors" that reinforce poverty. let's count 'em: "dramatic shifts in the economy" whatever they are; low wages (as opposed to the high wages paid to Mexicans in Laredo and West Virginians in the rural mountains); downsizing and outsourcing (which don't affect white autoworkers at GM or Delco in Michigan); and crumbling inner city schools (which would be irrelevant if people like Dyson stopped hauling Conservatives into court every time they try to sent impoverished blacks to good schools by providing tuition vouchers). Yep, these are harsh, all right. Dyson is really onto something here.

Having firmly linked Cosby to the Satanic Conservative movement, now it's time to bring in the "noted authority" argument to demolish Cos further. Referencing the above laundry list, he opines that:

None of these can be overcome by the good behavior of poor blacks. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley argues, "All the self-help in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of good jobs needed to employ the African American community."

Note the use of the absolute "None." This was the answer you almost never chose in a multiple choice test, because it was usually wrong, since there are so often exceptions to rules. But since a lefty is always right, Dyson feels no need to qualify himself here.

And ah, yes, the esteemed D.G. Kelley, whoever in Hades he is. The citation of a noted authority that nobody knows. Now here is a bogus quote if there ever was one, because, on the face of it, it's absolutely correct. All the self-help, etc. certainly will not eliminate poverty or create the number of good jobs needed. Right you are, Professor Kelley. BUT SELF HELP WILL CERTAINLY IMPROVE THINGS SIGNIFICANTLY, won't it? Cosby's solutions are hyped a bit in his stump speech, but they are not offered as a panacea. Again, via citation of alleged authority, Dyson mischharacterizes Cosby's arguments so as not to have to take them seriously.

Ah, but there's something even worse about Cosby:

Cosby's insistence that race has little to do with the circumstances of the black poor pleases right-wing pundits who believe his denial is a sign of mature black leadership.

Aha! Now we know. Cos has gone over to the Dark Side (no pun intended). Now, for sure, we can't take him seriously. Note how ideologues and scholar-pretenders like Dyson always insert the religious code words of the left, which then provide them with the cover to masquerade unsubtantiated opinion as proven fact.

Dyson bores in further:

For most of his career, Cosby has avoided the subject of race.

Indeed he has. Let me tell you a story. Wonker grew up in a white suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, although he did attend a private HS in the inner city. When Wonk was growing up, casual racism was the order of the day, and one neighbor even threatened one time to sell his house to blacks if our town put in ugly light poles on our street. The threat scared 'em off, too.

Meanwhile, back in our childhood, Wonker and all of Wonker's white-only friends, discovered the funniest guy in the world. His name was Bill Cosby. We would eagerly buy each new comedy routine recording (on 33RPM vinyl) that Cos put out, laugh our asses off, and site there by the record player for hours, memorizing every single line of every single recording so that we could recite them to each other, ad nauseam, whenver the spirit moved us. Those who know Cosby today only as the actor who presided over a long-running, highly successful sitcom can probably not imagine how wildly popular he was in his earlier incarnation as a stand-up comic.

His routines were immortal. Many of us still remember snippets, what, 40 years later. The Lord speaks to Noah: "Noah!" "Right!" "I want you to build me an ark! "Right!" The Lord gives Noah the ark's precise measurements in cubits. "Right! What's a cubit." We learned of Fat Albert and Weird Harold, and of Cosby's little brother who freaked out when Cos threatened to put "turtleheads" in his bed, and of how scared you could get listening to radio horror shows when the lights were out and the parents were out.

We had no clue that all this was happening in a downtrodden Philly neighborhood. We thought Cosby was the greatest. We would have died of happiness if he were our neighbor. (The hell with what our parents thought.) And we might even have put up with Fat Albert and Weird Harold. After all, they were Bill's friends, too.

Which was our point and Cosby's point. We never thought of Cos as some black guy our parents might not want in the 'hood. We thought of him as a person, a fun guy, a human being we'd really like to know. Cosby was actually way ahead of his time. In the overheated racial atmosphere of the 1960s, Cosby was quietly proving that black people had friends and parents and hopes and dreams and good and bad times just like us. Cosby's humor eliminated race as an issue, and substituted the absurdity of existing as a human being. And we loved him for it. It was a simple but powerful argument that no one seems to understand, up to this day. For this reason, it was hardly surprising that Cos became the first black megastar ever on TV. He has had no equal ever since in this arena. No one could resist Cosby. He was Everyman, and everyone invited him into their homes. And when he came back in his esteemed sitcom years later, it happened all over again. Even his recent bout with infidelity has failed to knock him off his pedestal.

Polarized, government-money-addicted, Marxist black intellectuals and extortionist parasites like Jesse Jackson have never forgiven Cosby for this. He has always been their greatest threat. Cosby trumps race and shows people a way out of this self-perpetuating dilemma. But were black people to escape from their enslavement to Democratic leftists and to the charlatans and frauds of their own race, this would destroy the entire race industry upon which careers like Dyson's are built.

And that's what we're really seeing here. A threat to the perks, to the pre-ordained lefty route to black "success." Cosby became wealthy beyond imagination by becoming all of us, whatever race, color, creed, or national origin. Dyson's hit piece is part of an ongoing campaign to discredit Cosby's crusade and preserve the perks of the race industry. But should they succeed, all they will accomplish is the perpetuation of the same, failed, victim-pattern, dooming yet more generations of disadvantaged black kids to lives of grinding poverty. Cosby is showing people a way out of this morass, this endless loop. Responsibility is the first step, he says, so TAKE IT. Dyson et.al. simply want more handouts from the government. And continuing class warfare would also help.

Dyson's piece gets increasingly shrill and even more obviously ideological and irrational in its last few one-sided grafs. So at this point, there's no reason to fisk the rest, particularly. (But if you want to read it, check the link which may require registration.) Yet the encouraging thing about all this is the reason why Dyson was torqued off enough to write a slanderous book in the first-place: Cosby still continues to attract substantial crowds from all races to his crusade. Cosby is a real threat to the dysfunctional inner-city world order that keeps lefty race-baiters in business. That's what's really going on in hit pieces like this.

But folks finally are starting not to buy the bogus arguments of intellectual frauds like Dyson. Should Cosby gain some success in his crusade, perhaps leftists and redistributionists such as he will start waking up in the morning to discover turtleheads in their beds rather than basking in the expected accolades from the usual suspects and glorying free columns for disseminating their casual and ill-reasoned bile in the morning papers.