There is perhaps absolutely nothing in common between Saddam Hussein and Bill Cosby, other than on this July 1 they both made news for their rants against their respective causes. Saddam’s jeremiad was at his first day in court, and is clearly intended to save what is left of his sorry butt; Cosby was speaking at an event in Chicago, with harsh words for the Black community, which he castigated for allowing its youth to fall into a culture of excuses and excesses for its plight.
Saddam is a butcher who deserves to be executed or stuck back in the hole he emerged from for the rest of his rotten life. There is no need to recount his crimes, now so commonly known. Cosby is an icon of the American Black community, and immensely successful stand-up comedian, comic actor, and author.
So what is the connection between the alpha and omega of humankind? No more than that they both have unpopular and uncomfortable things to say—Cosby to the Black community about its “dirty laundry”; Saddam to the world in what he will regard as a “defense” of his heinous actions.
Cosby will likely receive the dissent of a well-meaning, but sometimes wrong –headed “establishment” in the Black and Civil Rights communities. Some will say that he “blames the victims” when he derides black youth for dropping out of school, or using Black slang in the place of good English, for their devotion to rap music that demeans women, and fouls the air with expletives and employing the “N” word as almost a badge of honor. It is a culture that he believes will consign them to the bottom of the social structure.
Saddam will have no credibility as a man who will attempt to justify his heinous actions as in the interest of the people over whom he ruled. He terrorized, brutalized and murdered them to maintain his tyranny and loot his country. But he will, if allowed, have things to say that will draw his enemies, especially in their roles as former supporters, into the orbit of shared guilt. There’s the photo of Rumsfeld smiling and shaking his hand as an ally, there’s the “permission” of April Glaspie to annex Kuwait. There was the arms and intelligence supplied to him when he was “the enemy of our enemy,” Iran. And there was the way we looked the other way when he used his chemical weapons on the Kurds.
Cosby was bringing the hard news that the Black community cannot lay all blame at the door of white racism and discrimination. While that is not to be excused, neither should be decisions and behaviors that are self-destructive. The Black community must accept some of the responsibility for teen pregnancies, high crime and drop out rates, and actions that confirm the most negative of stereotypes. The Black community is fortunate to have a spokesman who will deliver such a perspective on its problems.
And so also must the US and other western powers accept some of the responsibility for the creation of monsters like Saddam. Justice demands that he has the right to say that much in his own defense; not so much justice for Saddam, but justice for us, so that maybe next time we might be less likely to create and maintain his like, until it become politically expedient to hang him out to dry to obscure our own dirty political laundry.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.3.2004)