Video: Warriors In Los Angeles

THE FINAL EPISODE OF THE COSBY SHOW RAN ON THE second night of the riots.

Theo Huxtable graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in psychology. The large and loving family gathered: the plot's only crisis had something to do with whether Theo could find enough tickets to the ceremony for all the friends and neighbors and family who had assembled to hug one another and make fond jokes. Dr. Huxtable (Bill Cosby) was goofy with pride. He had a flashback to the time some years before when Theo announced he wanted to forget about school and get a job: Dr. Huxtable, stern and loving, laid down the law. And then at the end of the show, Cosby and his television wife, Phylicia Rashad, walked off the stage set, out of fantasy into real time, as the studio audience applauded.

Now Dr. Huxtable is gone. What are Americans to do for fathers? Ronald Reagan was a hologram of American Dad. George Bush is, so to speak, a less vivid absence than Reagan. He seems to be away a lot, either physically or morally. When he does come home to try to focus, Americans almost wish he would not: He has been going too often into his '50s flustery, dufus mode. Mario Cuomo is the only Democrat who looks and talks like a father, but he refused to accept the role, and that amounted to abandonment. He left the Democratic race to the sibling rivals (Clinton, Kerrey, Brown, Tsongas and so on), who have spent the season gouging one another the way kids in a big unhappy family do.

Love is a zero-sum game in America, and the children riot over it. Or rather, they riot in the absence of it: it is usually the want of love that makes children vicious and sends them out of control. It seemed perfect that Cosby, America's ideal fantasy father (black) should vanish just at that moment: video metaphysics. Cosby-Huxtable was a heartbreaking American illusion. There is no deeper need among the nation's most deeply needy blacks than perfect fathers, Dr. Huxtables, role models for male children, grown men who will do the first, indispensable thing for children: make them safe and happy. Then teach them how to grow up, how to be intelligent and responsible and how to raise children of their own. Without all that, nothing can be done. It must be hard for some young blacks not to think of The Cosby Show as a species of fraud, a looking glass into a never-never America for them. The set goes blank.