The cover of TV Guide for September 16-22, 1989, has gone viral because it features two recently fallen idols – Bill Cosby and Roseanne Barr.
“How are the mighty fallen.” That’s ancient wisdom. King David (2 Samuel 1:25) said it 3000 years ago, and he wasn’t exempt from the truth of his own statement. David himself fell from grace in the eyes of the Lord when he got another man’s wife pregnant and sent her husband into a battle to be killed. That precipitated a chain of events that culminated a few decades later in the end of the unified Kingdom of Israel.
Fast forward 3000 years. I’ve been watching (or more accurately, listening while my wife and some friends watch) the Netflix documentary WILD, WILD COUNTRY. It’s about the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram, the intentional community in rural Oregon built around Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) in the early 1980s.
Long story short, Bhagwan and his principal lieutenant Ma Anand Sheela bought a ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, and brought several thousand followers there. Somehow, the enterprise turned dark. Or maybe it was dark to begin with.
The Rajneeshees wanted political power, and they had the numbers to take over the small town of Antelope. But it wasn’t so easy to take outvote the entirety of Washo County . The enterprising Sheela bused hundreds of homeless people to the commune to vote in local elections, which was apparently legal.
But Sheela was taking no chances. Right before the election, she introduced salmonella into the salad bars of ten local restaurants in the hope of rendering long-time residents too sick to vote. She also attempted to murder a county commissioner and a local judge. Those things were definitely not legal.
Sheela claimed she was acting on Bhagawan’s direct orders. He denied it and excommunicated her. Sheela entered a guilty plea and served 29 months in prison. When she got out, she moved to Switzerland, where she lives today. Bhagawan cut a deal with prosecutors, paid a fine, and made his way back to India, where he took the name Osho, and died in 1990.
So what does all this have to do with Bill Cosby and Roseanne Barr? Let me try to connect the dots.
The first dot takes us back to the Old Testament 2600 years ago, to a story from the Book of Daniel, in which King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream about an idol with a golden head and feet of clay. It was a parable about the destruction of the Babylonian empire. Nowadays, it has become a metaphor for the discovery that the authority figures (parents, teachers, etc.) you’ve admired have the same weaknesses you do, or maybe even worse ones.
For some people, Bill Cosby was one such idol. Wesley Morris wrote in the New York Times of his struggle to separate Cosby’s career from his crimes. Morris says that for him and many other young African-American men, the character of Cliff Huxtable on THE COSBY SHOW was life-changing. It wasn’t simply that Morris admired Cosby’s performance. Rather, the fictional character was so compelling that it became a literal role model. And now, the man who brought Cliff Huxtable to life has been convicted as a serial rapist. Morris is no dummy. He understands the difference between Cosby and the character he played. But the truth about Cosby’s offscreen life has been hard for Morris to assimilate.
I haven’t run across anyone who claims that Rosanne Barr’s TV persona was that kind of role model. Still, she had her fans; ROSEANNE was one of the most watched shows on television in the 80s and early 90s. Her eccentric behavior started in that era, and became more offensive (deliberately, or so it seems) in recent years. Since ABC resurrected her show precisely because she’d become a prominent Trump Deplorable, the network deserves the fiasco it wound up with.
I’m not here to discuss those shows as works of art, since I’ve never watched a single episode of either. What interests me is the process of hero worship and the confusion of performers with their roles. And by performer, I include not only actors, but also artists, athletes, and even teachers and politicians – people who earned a place in the spotlight because of a specific skill, and whose fans projected an aura of virtue onto them.
The guru principle is an ancient and (mostly, I assume) honorable tradition in Asian spirituality. Find a teacher, spend time – years, if necessary – making sure he’s authentic, and put your absolute trust in him. Then you’re on your way to enlightenment.
That sounds weird, and even perverse, to American ears. But our western tendency to hero worship contains similar elements. We aren’t content to admire the achievements of our favorite musicians, actors, and athletes. We want to believe that they’re also smart, brave, and ethical – better versions of ourselves. When, inevitably, they let us down, we get sad, and then we get mad.
I wonder when the tendency to confuse the artist with the art began. My theory, which I offer with absolutely no empirical evidence, is that it was connected to the advent of motion pictures, when viewers began to associate actors with the roles they played.
John Wayne didn’t do anything particularly heroic in his offscreen life, but he became an American hero because the characters he played in his best films embodied (and arguably helped create) the myth of the Old West. He had plenty of help from directors, writers, co-stars, cinematographers, etc., but his contribution was still an achievement. I think it’s fine to admire John Wayne as an actor, as long as you understand that John Wayne wasn’t the Ringo Kid or Rooster Cogburn. Hell, John Wayne wasn’t even John Wayne. He was born Marion Morrison. Give him credit as an actor, by all means, but separate the man from his roles.
One important way in which American hero worship differs from the guru principle is that Americans are too impatient to spend much time investigating the authenticity of their heroes. We make snap judgments. In sports and the arts, that’s not such a big deal. We like what we like. Root, root, root for the home team.
In politics and religion, though, that impulse renders us vulnerable to con artists. Even worse, uncritical adulation can corrupt well-intentioned people. Hero worship is hard on the heroes.
One of John Wayne’s contemporaries, Rita Hayworth, talked about the downside of being identified with her most famous role. Hayworth (born Margarita Cansino) had a brief reign as the world’s most desirable woman thanks to her starring role in GILDA in 1946. She was married and divorced five times. “Men go to bed with Gilda,” she said, “but they wake up with me.”
All of which begs the question of what we should do when the spotlight inevitably shifts from our idol’s golden head to his or her clay feet. If they’ve committed crimes, of course, there are legal remedies to apply. My question is about the proper way to assess the person’s legacy, in terms of the body of work they’ve left behind.
One approach, which is becoming the default response on the Left, is that when a bad guy is identified, we should shun him and his works as well. THE COSBY SHOW, ROSEANNE, Woody Allen’s films, etc. – all banished from the canon. I think that’s an overreaction.
Music critic Greil Marcus wrote “We can rewrite history, but we should not unwrite it. Ultimately a work lives its own life in the world. What the work does and what happens to it out in the world is an open, complex, and interesting question. The work is not the author.”
I think that distinction – “the work is not the author” – is vital, and it’s true of political as well as cultural life. If you dig deeply enough into anyone’s private life, you’re going to find flaws. Deeply flawed people can create great art, or great legislation.
(Conversely, we should remember that being a really good person doesn’t mean you’re a good artist, or an effective politician.)
If we opt to shun the work of flawed men and women, there won’t be much left to enjoy. Our challenge is to accept the fact that both our friends and our enemies have at least one thing in common. They all have flaws.
None of this means we should stop having heroes. We just need to remember that heroism is a label we’re projecting onto them, and stop being surprised when they turn out to be complex human beings, with flaws as well as virtues. Just like us.
