When Common Sense is Not Enough

I followed up on Cosby just enough to hear Cornel West and Mike Dyson comment. (Thanks NPR for the .ram files). West came correct, Dyson went out into left field. I also breezed through Mark Neal's piece on Hiphop long enough to hear him drop a half dozen 'sheroes' names, and then came to a disdainful stop by the time I got to this:

As Pough notes, "rappers become grunt workers for the patriarchy: they sow the field of misogyny for the patriarchy and provide the labor necessary to keep it in operation, much as Black men and women provided the free and exploited labor that built the United States."

Then I went to Tavis' site and read the transcript. Cosby said the following:

I am saying to the people, “Hey, man, the bridge is out. The bridge is out.” You can drive over there. You can get angry with me if you want to. A friend of mine said--I was sitting with a diabetic friend of mine, and this cat has got to take a shot or else he'll go blblblblbl--like that. So the cat sat down and he ordered a Coca-Cola. And I said, “Hey, man, what are you doing with a Coca-Cola?” The guy said, “What you want me--” I said, “OK, man.” You can go ahead and get mad at me, but you're not gonna get mad at the Coca-Cola. I'm not the one sending--you understand?

In the milleu precision writing, we would say that Dr. Cosby is lacking in specificity. In the Old School, we would slap Mr. Neal upside his head as soon as he referenced the next authoritative author. Cosby is a multimillionaire because he understands something about communicating basic things in simple accessible language. And he makes you laugh when he does it. He doesn't get bogged down in jargon.

When Smiley suggested that he and Cos could talk for hours, Cosby said no. You don't need to talk for hours. The concept is simple. Let Dyson talk for hours. Let a thousand academics write ten thousand books. What do you get?

Isn't it fascinating that Cosby got the whole country talking with just a few well placed simple words? Isn't it fascinating that one or two sentences removed turns the whole meaning? It is very refreshing to me to see wisdom expressed plainly, and I think Cosby underlines the point that it needn't have been him if somebody's dad had done their job.

Cosby will not run for president. There will not be a 12 step program. People just have to use their heads, because when common sense is not enough, and people start turning to theorists, it's already too late.

Funny, maybe that's why certain intellectuals trip so hard over hiphop. Sometimes it only takes 16 bars to tell the truth.