Joan Tarshis

When I hear of horrific things like like Tarshis being sodomized after downing a redeye, I feel compelled to reach out to the victim through shared experience, though I myself was never forcibly sodomized. Stuart Lone, my fabled heroin addicted stepfather, merely groped me, tortured my dead brother in front of my eyes. It was mother's man before him, another stone addict named Beaky, ugly as sin, who tried to rape me, and I let my ex Frank penetrate me anally, perhaps out of self-hatred, and I did not like the pressure on my bowel. Had problems days afterward. Well, I found the old woman, coping with her torment, much as I am letting it all hang out, coping with mine and losing, understanding Robinson's cautious commiseration  and Ta-Nehisi Coates' struggle with his conscience.

As an Italian woman with quadriplegia assaulted by a black relative of a public housing tenant and molested by a biracial inner city woman, I do not really have a say in this internecine argument about black identity spilling over into white cross over acclaim. Cosby did not have the greatest impact on me due to the popularity of Cliff Huxtable, rather, I had to endure countless instructional films of Bill Cosby doing exaggerated versions of Ralph Ellison's lone black man defiantly penetrating through the brick walls of white preconceptions, and it influenced my subconscious about the righteousness of being a straight arrow. Now I have to live with the imagery of his alleged forced penetrations, with these women alone with him like naked sheep, shorn of their woolly coats, in our sexually permissive society.

I tweeted to Joan. You can read it. I cannot enter into how she lives with it, being forcibly fucked by such a talented man who had such an influence on our psyches. It isn't about whether or not we believe her, or want to defend an icon who may have to end his public career on such a note, it is more about what kind of society we want, where trauma is apparently the new normal, and nothing is innocent any longer. Coates' observation that we generate our moral values from people like Cosby may seem a deft perception, but in reality, personality cults cut across human cultures. It isn't simply an American meme. Napoleon is still a herald in France. Margaret Thatcher was part of a Reagan era triad, of some sort, and so on. Nomenclatures evoke their own language, and Ellison would probably be turning in his grave. I was naive enough to tape his picture and obituary on my door in the inner city the year he passed away in 1991, a man whose genius strove more than most to call identity politics the tragedy for which they were. Right now I can't forgive anyone. Black journalists, corporate media, women like me and Joan who eat it and don't fight back until it is far too late, certainly not a comedian who made me believe my moral center was a justified possibility.