It was, at first, hard to explain to many people why I felt so shaken when I heard of the death of Bill Cosby's son Ennis. After all, few members of the general public had ever even heard the young man's name. Many celebrities have lost children before Bill Cosby. Even the manner of his death was not altogether uncommon. Yet I, like many others, experienced a deep feeling of loss and anger at the time of the murder. Something unthinkable had taken place; someone we'd cared about was killed.

For eight years, unbeknownst to some, teenaged actor Malcom Jamal Warner portrayed the everyday life of Ennis Cosby on The Cosby Show, the most popular American television program of the 1980s. Every Thursday night at 8 p.m., Warner dramatized Ennis's words, his problems, his grace under the pressure of his domineering father. While Bill Cosby often ridiculed his son's life and words in his personal crusade to re-establish patriarchy as the dominant mode of familial relations in the 1980s, Theo always calmly resisted with reason and warmth. Unlike some of the other characters on the show, he neither relented or was broken. When Bill Cosby "humorously" reminded his son that "I brought you into the world; I can take you out," Theo didn't smile. He simply endured. At the series' end, as the social and political intensity of the 80s waned with the decade itself, Theo prevailed. When both Ennis Cosby and Theo were diagnosed with a learning disability, when their father's cruel taunts of laziness were revealed as misplaced and unjust, Theo walked away with the show. The focus moved from the oppressively ideal father to the son's humanity and resilience.

The 1980s were a time of vicious reaction and equally fierce resistance. Reaganism created its own mortal enemies. It was a time when an African-American presidential candidate won votes and real support from white America, a time when the dismantling of South African apartheid was made a real possibility through social action and popular resistance at home and abroad. A time when people who needed to, "acted up" to save their lives and those of others. Like the character of "Theo," they represented that part of the '80s that I miss so much - the part that resisted Reagan and fought back, and prevailed - the part that never gave up and was never broken down. It was an altogether more innocent time when oppression and freedom were clear choices for most Americans. If many chose to vote for Reagan and to cheer Bill Cosby when he mocked and threatened his disabled son, others took the opportunity to oppose them in their own ways.

By the dawn of the nineties, as The Cosby Show show declined in popularity, various forms of genuine social action were replaced by bursts of social and cultural despair. It was both ironic and somehow fitting that the second night of the Los Angeles riots was also the final night of the The Cosby Show. In the 1990s, the spirit and kinds of popular revolts are very much disconnected from coordinated collective action. There's a void in leadership and common will. The present decade is a far more complex and disturbing period in history. Popular culture itself has been displaced by a collective appetite for sensation and horror on a grand scale. This is not to say that these sensations are not significant in their own right; they clearly speak to an element of shared yearning. But very often the cultural politics of these public spectacles have become obscured in the lust for the merely grotesque. Ennis's murder competes now for air-time with news of the fatal sexual assault of a toddler who paraded around in backless dresses. Popular political action seems very far away from the popular sport of choosing sides involving such non-scandals as Whitewater or Newtgate. Certainly, the real politics of Gingrich and Clinton do not seem nearly so important lately as their various financial and sexual dalliances.

Unlike Ronald Reagan and Bill Cosby, who boldly dared their opposition to challenge them, no one is presently staking their ground and demanding that we take sides in the social, cultural, and political dramas of our time.

Copyright © 1997 by Robin Markowitz. All Rights Reserved.
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