It is the Cos

Since I have already lost a fair share of readership after that first paragraph, let me go on and explain what I mean to those of you who are, with admirable skepticism, sticking with me. It has been pretty well documents that the media cover violent crime more than any other sort of crime, and that they cover it well out of proportion to its actual rate of occurrence (see, for, example, this article in the Marquette Law Review). I would be remiss, however, to lay all this simply at the feet of “The Media.” After all, the press doesn’t simply create interest; it also feeds the interests that it finds already exist in its audience. Any understanding of popular crime sensations needs to account for the complex interactions of everybody who comes in contact with the story. It also needs to think — in a structural sense — about the cultural work that such narratives do. That is, what do we all get out of the cycle of crime and out consumption of its narratives? How does that cycle fulfill certain needs and desires that we have? Of course there is no way I can even begin to answer those questions in a reasonable way in a blog post, but I want to set out some signposts for inquiry that I, or anybody, might want to come back to later in a more thorough and careful way.

Let me venture to say that the coverage of sex crimes in particular is so prominent because it easily stokes a need for moral boundaries and moral outrage. There is virtually nothing in American culture that is more laben with moral implications than sex. We more or less take it for granted that everything sexual is a moral reflection on the sexual actor. When we combine the moral judgement of the law with the question of sex, it is a particularly potent, and even addictive, concoction. What do I mean by this? I’ll pick on the TV series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit for a moment just to give an example of the language of sex, morality, and outrage. SVU has been on the air for over 20 years, which is an incredible testimony to the show’s power and cultural relevance. For over 20 years, the show has begun with this voiceover: “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” “Especially heinous” catches my ear/eye. Sex crimes are outside the “norm” of “regular” felonies, so much so that they merit their own TV show. These “vicious” felonies — as opposed, my linguistic alarm warns me, to the more benign or benevolent kinds of felonies? — generate narratives that we will consume over decades because they fulfill some needs we have. “Heinous” and “vicious” are morally loaded terms that signal an absolute understanding of an event or action. There is, and can be, no middle ground. It’s a binary of good and evil, and that may be precisely what we crave. Sex crimes tend to be marked by a vivid border between good and evil, and that can be emotionally and intellectually satisfying. Still there are a couple other things in that brief narration that also seem worth of thinking about. The first is the phrase “sexually based offenses.” I’m intrigued by the word “based.” Did the writers insert that term as a kind of euphemism because “sex crimes” or “sex offenses” might have seemed too direct and potentially indelicate? If that’s the case, it certainly says something about the ways in which moral outrage also meld with moral squeamishness. We believe sex to be an absolute moral marker, but we have difficult even naming sex directly. I think if you asked virtually any reputable expert on sexuality, they would tell you that this is a fairly common cultural convention. Or, and perhaps this can also work in conjunction with what I just mentioned, does the idea of “based” give the producers and viewers a bit more latitude to explore a wider variety of felonies that might not appear to be “directly” sexual? That is, it can expand the moral power of the sex narrative to other realms. If we can tie a felony back to sex, then we can make sure that it takes center stage as particularly vicious and heinous. The other thing that strikes my editor’s ear is the passive construction: “sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous.” That passive voice is a slick and possibly culturally necessary rhetorical move. It allows us hear hear the absolute morality of sex offenses but it disguises our role in propagating the moral standard. It gives us an “everybody knows” kind of authority. If you don’t know this, then there is something wrong with you; indeed, you may be one of those offenders yourself. But such a broad imputation is also a problem. It’s worth raising the questions that the passive voice avoids. Who exactly considers sexually based offenses in this light? Did these people who decided to consider them in this light just do so arbitrarily or is there is history to their consideration? What is that history? Is it important to know how and why we got to that point? Could we change this consideration? Who gets to decide the boundaries of morality anyway? Raising such questions does not mean that the people who hold such views are wrong, but it does give us a clearer and necessary perspective on where we stand on an important social question. The passive voice neatly shifts all accountability and responsibility onto the felon, but it doesn’t provide any kind of context to help us understand how sexually based offense might be something more than the moral failings of a particular individual. The passive voice helps keep the cultural narrative simple, absolute, and sensational. “Mistakes were made” is a common political phrase that we sometimes greet with skepticism (and some people over at Wikipedia have done a really good job of showing this; it’s worth reading even if just for a chuckle) because it defers the — to me very problematic — concepts of “responsibility” and “accountability” away from the speaker (and I’ll almost certainly blog about process later) and onto the world at large, or at least onto the speaker’s perceived subordinates. Let me be explicit that I am not trying to blame the victims to sex offenses or assign them responsibility. What I am saying is that a more complex and less ethically loaded understanding of sex offenses might serve us well.

The cultural narratives that circulate about sex offenses, of which the Cosby story is just one example, are especially powerful because, in part, the are circular and, in that way, self-sustaining. To find an example of how this works, I googled the question “What types of crime get most press coverage?”, and the search returned as its top answer a document from the US Department of Justice’s National Criminal Justice Reference Service, a subsection of the Department’s Office of Justice Programs. Ah, the DOJ and its Offices. Regular readers of this blog will recognize that the result just might trigger all kinds of experiential skepticism in me. At any rate, Google gave me a direct link to Chapter 18 of the 2000 National Victim Assistance Academy handbook. Were I filled with academic diligence, I’d hesitate to drive into a 21-year-old document as an authoritative source. On the other hand, it’s important to think about what the first hit on a Google search might say; after all, Search Engine Optimization is all the rage now, and it presumes that people don’t usually look at anything more than the first few sources that any search provides. After a rather lengthy “abstract,” the text of the chapter begins in this way: “The media’s significant focus on high-profile crimes, as well as societal ills related to crime and victimization, have wielded considerable influence, both positive and negative, on policies and programs relevant to criminal justice, juvenile justice, and victims’ rights and services. News coverage ranging from a single report to more widespread coverage of key issues has profoundly affected the delivery of justice and victim services.” Once again, my editorial ears are burning. In perfect Goverment-ese, the chapter sets itself up for a passive tone, even if it doesn’t directly used the passive voice. “Considerable influence, both positive and negative” is an utterly empty phrase. Let’s just try to substitute a term to see how empty: “The weather wields considerable influence, both positive and negative, on human activities.” Yeah. That’s not insight. That’s not analysis. That’s “No shit, Sherlock.” What exactly are those influences? How big are they? What are the effects? Is it fair to say that tornado are drought should be in same category because they are both “significant?” The report begins to address the issue via equivocation, and that it is an instructive as it is unhelpful. Lurking behind such a false-passive choice of language is a desire not to offend any reader (by taking, God forbid, a rational, analytical stand), and instead play to “everyone knows” platitudes and presumptions. This is a handbook that has explicit “learning objectives,” yet what it is teaching from the opening sentences is to work within the moral, commercial, legal status quos rather than intervene in them in any significant way. It cements all kinds of pre-existing ideas and ideals into place my refusing even to name them. Moreover, this is a spectacular deployment of the fallacy of “begging the question.” I have all kinds of qualms about how people generally use that term in the wrong way. “Begging the question” does NOT meant “to raise or ask the question.” Rather, it means that you assume that the conclusion of your statement/argument is true in the premise of the question/thesis itself. This is why this is such a spectacular example, especially for us rhetoric geeks who believe that language really does matter. “The media’s significant focus on high-profile crimes” is a spectacular disaster. Tell me, please, how a crime is high-profile if it doesn’t have significant media coverage to start with? I mean, am I missing out on all kinds of high-prolfile crimes that aren’t getting coverage? “High profile” means extensively covered in the press. Indeed, the Department of Justice has an entire bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to getting crimes into the press and creating high-profile cases. US Attorneys’ Offices have press liaison and create press releases that highlight and tout their own prosecutions and offer the press pre-digested paragraphs to run as part of their coverage. What I cannot tell you is whether or not sex offenses receive coverage and promotion in a share disproportionate to their adjudication, but if somebody wants a dissertation topic, I’ll give you that one for free. What I’m trying to say here is that both the press and the justice system have vested interests in manufacturing high profiles for crime. Getting press coverage justifies for the justice system it’s existence and takes the focus of the more mundane and ugly parts of the system. “High-profile” often implies “most morally outraging” and (allegedly) unambiguous moral outrage, as we have seen, is a recipe for commercial success, and it likely a measure of bureaucratic success, too. For the media, the same moral outrage is both a propellant for the coverage and an end of the coverage in itself. It fuels sales, excites clicks, and draws viewers’ eyes. It reinforces the unexamined and simplistic circularity of crime as a clear story of good and evil.

And there is a problematic entertainment value in moral outrage, too. I’m thinking, as an example, of Ronan Farrow’s book/podcast/TV series Catch and Kill. Far be it from me to opine whether Farrow should write about this topic or not, though it’s potentially worth talking about how certain forms of privilege open up spaces for him to do it in high-profile ways. At his moment, I’m not even particularly interested in the mechanics of his journalism, which may, indeed, be quite excellent by prevailing standards. Instead, I want to think, perhaps more superficially, about the outward ways in which his work circulates in the world and in the American imagination. The first thing is the title. I have no idea who came up with this; titles, any author can tell you, are often a more collaborative process between writer, editor, and publisher than most people would thing. Therefore, I’m not casting aspersions on any individual. However, I do need to ask if this title would be acceptable to describe a book about any other sort of felon than a sex offender? The title is, after all, frank in its violence. I understand that the title also refers directly to the tabloid practice of buying and burying stories, particularly of a sexual nature, that would be damaging (or indicting) to the subjects of the stories. I also understand that Farrow understands himself to be, and compellingly argues his case, the victim in having his stories on sex offenses killed by NBC. I also think that Farrow, his editors, and publishers are too smart to not be using the title of this practice ironically. If “catch and kill” is a journalistic practice that is designed to shield sex offenders, then the point of this particular book is to catch and kill the people involved in that practice and the people whom they shield. Saying, for example, that Farrow is “a bad man” can be taken in more than one way. All that aside, would we talk about catching and killing thieves (or narratives about them)? Fraudsters? There is something particularly and dangerously loaded about the phrase when it comes to sex offenders. Part of the understandable outrage surrounding Bill Cosby’s released is that people had believed that he was caught and killed. To see him released and alive casts the world in its true moral ambiguity, perhaps even neutrality. Things aren’t always the way they “should” be; the arc or the universe does not always bend toward justice, or if that is unavailable, retribution. You might be surprised to know that prisons are full of sex offenders who will publicly vow violent retribution on sex offenders once they get out from behind the wire. Although most of these promisers deny they are locked up for a sex offense, the cognitive dissonance here is still and awesome and frightening thing to behold. Furthermore, we can find more than several examples of how people who are registered sex offenders — that is placed by legal requirement on a public list of convicted persons — have been hunted down and killed or injured because they are on that list. The moral clarity of protecting people from “especially heinous” criminals can beget its own moral failures. The ethos of catch and kill is powerful and pervasive. It’s worrying when it becomes a righteous and entertaining sport. Just looking through the review blurbs of Farrow’s Catch and Kill, I’m struck by the praise that melds our need for outrage and entertainment. A sampling: “a crackerjack journalistic thriller”; “reads like a great detective novel”; “full of plot and drama” “chocka¬block with scoops and revelations”; “nearly every page revealing a provocative detail about a household name in media or entertainment”; “a propulsive, cinematic page-turner”; “combines righteous anger, gossip and comedy.” I understand the commercial need to sell a book, but we can learn some things from the commercial need to sell a book. In this praise there resides much to be learned about why people might want to read something potentially difficult and traumatizing in the first place, or at least something about how one might coax them into starting to read about it.

Certainly, American history presents other examples of how and why readers approach morally and emotionally difficult subjects. The debate around slavery and the publications related to abolition jump immediately to my mind. Of course one of the most difficult questions surrounding even our historical understanding of slavery — let alone the contemporary discourse about it — it the question of the extend to which slavery was also a system of legally and culturally sanctioned sexual offenses. Things get even more complicated (both then and now) when we venture to say that we probably should not characterize all sexualized encounters under slavery in the same way. This is difficult to do even when the voices emerging from slavery are urging us to do just that (Harriet Jacobs being a fascinating example). It is all too tempting to confuse moral clarity with moral simplicity, and that is part of what may lie at the heart of the Cosby controversy, as well as many others. A passive voice discussion of slavery and abolition elides observations like those of Martin Delany who argued that African Americans should not team up with white abolitionists because, simply given the nature of white privilege, African Americans will end up in “a mere secondary, underling position, in all our relations to them.” It’s not that white abolitionists are reprehensible people; rather it’s a matter of those who have privilege and speak for a victim still tend to maintain their privilege at any cost. Even being on the “right side of history” is not without its moral costs. A muddled, moral middle is difficult, but it is also truthful. When we favor the clarity of binary distinctions, we set ourselves up to reprise the ethical battle. Part of the anguish over the Cosby case is that the media, with no small participation from Cosby himself, set Cosby up, over his career, to be “America’s Dad.” This likely happened, in part, because there were many stories about him that had been caught and killed become they could besmirch his public moral rectitude. It also happened because American audiences’ crave a moral certainty that Cosby was more than happy (hypocritically) to espouse in his fictional representations and political and social pronouncements. We, as Americans, have a distinct cultural inability to say, “Listen to this person on some things, but not on others. This person is both great and flawed.” For us, it’s all or nothing, and when the binary collapses, that’s entertainment in the form of righteous outrage. A dad, whether America’s or not, can be both steadfast objects of emulation and terribly broken. Felons can have run afoul of the law and yet still be as trustworthy as any innocent. It’s merely that our cultural narratives encourage us to think that that cannot be the case. Cosby set himself up, with the encouragement of virtually all of us, for a great fall. We never really reckoned with the fallout of making a black man America’s Dad; given the history of race in this country that connection was bound to collapse. We never reckoned with the unexamined patriarchal assumptions that contribute to all the unspoken meanings around a term like “America’s Dad.” Given the way that discussions of sex and gender are currently moving, this is a part of the discussion of Cosby that remains far too implicit.

Yet snobby, elitist me still wants to say that we could have seen something like this coming. That we have at least one example of how much of this played out, if only in fiction, more than 400 years ago. Literature people will clearly have noticed the ironic, punning title of this post: It is the Cos. As It Cosby. But for non-literature people (or at least non-snobby lit people) this is just me stealing from Shakespeare, in particular from Othello Act V, Scene 2. You all remember Othello, he was Venice’s General, even though he stood apart from most Venetians by being black. People generally thought of him as an upright, moral stalwart, but as we can surmise because this play is a tragedy, he did also have some tragic flaws. To boil it down to its most simplistic synopsis (and yes, I’m aware of the irony of this), things in the play get to the point where Othello believes that his wife, Desdemona, is a sexual offender. That is he things she is cheating on him with another soldier. This is an untrue story, but Desdemona has no opportunity to catch it and kill it. Othello, in righteous but mistaken anger, goes to their bedroom to exact justice/revenge on the sleeping Desdemona, and this is what he says:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,–
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!–
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood;
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It must needs wither: I’ll smell it on the tree.

Let me deny right here that I’m claiming that Othello it just like Cosby. What I am saying is that sexual mores and boundaries, violence, patriarchal privilege and entertainment have been bound up together for a long, long time. They have been bound together so long and so tightly that we now refer to them as “classics.” Shakespeare’s fictional world, however, has the great advantage or not just portraying moral ambiguity and human frailty, but actually requiring those characteristics in order for the play to exist at all. There is, but the time we get to Act V, Scene 2, no way that this play can end well for anybody, and we have to sit with that in our hearts and minds even as the characters perform rhetorical acrobatics above our heads. Othello is going to catch and kill in the name of a kind of moral rectitude because his wife has not been able to catch and kill the too believable — because too pervasive — cultural narrative that “taints” her. It is the sexual nature of her “crime” that makes it especially heinous to him. I’m not sure that we could have had a tragedy here is Desdemona had allegedly, say, ripped off the tailor or even spat on a priest. I won’t make a Shakespeare class out of this, and legions of Shakespeare scholars are sure to disagree with me, but I’ll even venture to say that part of Othello’s great flaw is that he acts on an edict born of a moral absolutism that he doesn’t even necessarily agree with. I guess one question that I have about the play is whether it could find an audience today. If someone did a reboot or remake or it 417 years after its first production, would they have to make substantial changes to plot and character to recoup their investment? Does it have sufficient scoops and revelations? Enough thrills? I won’t even try to speculate on that because, when I looked up Othello remakes, I found one from 2001 listed on imdb.com, and somebody had posed the question under FAQs: “Is this based on a novel?” Maybe the 21st century just isn’t ready for the 17th.

Still, for this post, it is the Cos. It’s possible for Bill Cosby to be guilty, and it’s simultaneously possible that he got a raw deal from the justice system. It’s possible that a cultural icon might not be a saint. It’s possible to be caught and not killed. It might even be possible to change a culture without resorting to the sensational. All these things can be true, but their truths require us to think and feel complexly, to embrace ambiguity, to patiently and carefully examine our own positions in the world and how and why we got there. Someone said about 2200 years ago, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” To think that the moral high ground begets just desserts is vanity.