On Putin and Bill Cosby

I was abused by Bill Cosby once (not sexually). When I was eighteen, I asked my parents if we could go to the Newport Jazz Festival before I headed off to college. When we arrived, the festival was abuzz with gossip that Bill Cosby was at the festival and that he was going to give a special performance of some kind. 

    "What is he going to do?" I wondered aloud "Is he going to do stand-up comedy?"

    "I doubt that will happen" said my mother.

That made sense. He had been retired from the limelight for some time at this point. It should be noted that this was August of 2001, at least 3 years before the first public allegations against Cosby. In the festival program, there was a headlining act listed as "The 'Coz for Good Music". On the back of the program, there was an add describing Cosby's philanthropy which I believe connected inner city youth in Philadelphia with music education and resources. However, nobody knew or could even guess as to what Bill Cosby was actually going to do during his 1 hour headlining spot at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Cosby's set time came and the stage was set. During which a peculiar arrangement of tom-tom drums with a splash cymbal and chimes was placed at the front of the stage. There was no vocal microphone. A jazz combo filed onstage and took their place. Cosby walked out to a huge applause with much hooting and hollering. He looked uneasy, perturbed even. After a few moments, he waved off the crowd and bellowed a terse, unamplified "Thank You" to the audience and the crowd died down. A stagehand walked out, gave him a conductor's baton and he turned to the band. Cosby looked awkwardly at the band and they at him for more than a few beats. You could hear a pin drop. He then, somewhat nervously and frustratingly, started gesturing for the band to start. 

The band went into an uptempo swing. Cosby turned to the random assortment of drums put out for him, held the baton by the end, then began to bang on the drums with the cork handle of the baton. Eventually, he became frustrated with the contraption and his ad-hoc drumstick. I'm pretty sure this was when he realized this was a bad idea. Angry at himself but not wanting to look the fool he was, he walked toward the band and began to try to conduct. His conducting mainly consisted of him pointing at one player or another and then making a fervent "give me more" gesture with his hands; changing soloists and accompanists abruptly. He also forced the drummer to slow down repeatedly, crushing the levity of swing music down into an abstract dirge. 

After several minutes, I couldn't handle it any longer. I got up off the picnic blanket and walked toward the merchandise tables away from Cosby's cacophony. Among the merchandise tables were other likewise unhappy concert-goers. We began to chat with the vendors and among ourselves. Bewilderment shortly gave way to contempt.

    "This is just terrible!"

    "I know, I can't stand it."

    "It's offensive, these people are all jazz fans who came to hear world class professionals"

    "What is he even doing up there? It's an embarrassment and it's pathetic."

    "I think he's just an asshole." said one lady finally.

The music was getting worse so I continued to walk away from the stage but soon reached the entrance gate. Cosby was on the main stage and could be heard audibly throughout the entire festival grounds. There was no escaping Cosby's acoustic fuckery without leaving the festival early and missing Diana Krall close out the day. I sighed and reluctantly headed back to the festival to endure the rest of what had now become a de-facto Milgrim Experiment conducted on unwitting jazz fans. As I walked back through the merchandise tables I passed yet more people trying to escape Cosby.

    "This is terrible!" A young married couple shouted at me from across the way

    "You can't get away from it," I said. "I just walked all the way to the entrance gate. He's a fucking asshole!"

    The guy in the couple laughed in agreement "Yea, He is an asshole!"

The world now knows all too well that Bill Cosby is not just an asshole but an abusive monster. Nevertheless, I can't help but think back to that day and wonder; Why? How could he have thought that would go well for him? Why did George Wein and the managers of the festival think it would go well? Why did professional session musicians agree to be flown in from LA just to be humiliated? Why did the majority of the people there just sit on the lawn and politely accept an hour of sonic abuse from an uber-wealthy misanthrope?

Just today, I watched video footage of a Ukrainian farmer towing an armored surface to air missile launcher away from the battlefield with his tractor. Heavy weapons and vehicles of all kinds are being commandeered by ordinary Ukrainians, still running and fully loaded with munitions. Russian POWs talk to Ukrainian authorities openly about how they were told nothing by their superiors; that they were told they were going on a training exercise and then driven over the border and dropped into a firefight. Russian officers have pulled back from the front and cannot be reached on the civilian walkie-talkie's issued to the front line troops. Columns of vehicles sit parked idly on the highway between Kyiv and Belarus stretching 40 miles. If Russia was actually fighting NATO, a few A-10 Warthogs would have wiped them out days ago. Multiple Russian fighter jets and helicopters are shot down by Ukrainian forces every day throughout the country.

I look at the Ukraine section of liveuamap.com and what I see looks like how Bill Cosby's 2001 Newport Jazz Festival performance sounded; awful, chaotic, pathetic, shockingly amateur given who's in charge, the stupidest of all possible outcomes, ultimately pointless and futile. Vladimir Putin cannot bring about a new Russian Empire anymore than Bill Cosby can perform his jazz opus.Yet again, I ask myself the same questions; How did Putin think this was going to go well for him? Why did the rest of the Russian military enable such a predictable catastrophe? My mother is fond of saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely". I suppose that same corruption extends to the mind of the powerful as well. Does a mind addled by decades sycophancy and unchecked power inevitably lead to delusions of grandeur? Does that unchecked power inevitably try to manifest those delusions no matter how unfeasible they actually are? Alas, a window into the mind of the most powerful is something we do not have. All we can say about the madness in Ukraine is all we could say about the travesty in Newport that summer; This is terrible, he's a fucking asshole, and there's nowhere to go to get away from it. We just have to sit through it until it ends.