O.J. Pimpson
Despite desperate attempts on the part of certain Republican operatives to focus attention on a standard, unexciting power struggle within the upper eschelons of the soon-to-be Democratic Senate, I think the thing everyone was talking about this week was OJ. Well, him and Borat. People sure do love that wacky, mixed up guy...
But mainly, OJ. The Juice. Nordberg. The Nicole Brown-related news this week has been nostalgic for me. Reminds me of high school to see Fred Goldman ranting on my TV. Like that fucking Cranberries song "Linger" that I've always hated, yet for some reason brings me back to my sophomore year in high school with such uncanny clarity that I almost can't stand to hear it for more than a few seconds.
People are still upset about the OJ Simpson verdict. All he did was butcher his ex-wife and her friend, and then try poorly to cover it up before running from the cops in extremely half-assed fashion! Oh, yeah, and then hire expensive scumbag lawyers to select the dumbest jurors possible so they could lie to them and waste everyone's time and money, so OJ could play golf all day and pretend to look for "real killers" rather than accept his punishment. Lighten up, people!
Seriously, though, OJ Simpson is a murderer and deserves to be in jail. But he's not, because rich people, and especially famous rich people, play by different rules in America. If you want to be upset, there's your cause for upset.
Personally, I'm not thrilled with the idea of OJ Simpson making money off of waving his guilt in front of everyone's face now that he's immune to prosecution for his crimes. But I still can't shake the feeling that people are upset about this case for the wrong reason. And that reason is: racism! Neat!
I think white people are so upset about OJ, in large part, because they don't like the idea of a black man killing a white woman and getting away with it. I know, I know, people are upset by miscarriages of justice. But how many wrongfully imprisoned people do we have in America? We release more and more innocent men and women every month because of newly-discovered DNA evidence. And conversely, how many murderers get away without being punished? Tons! Thousands! You may even know someone who has killed with impunity. How would you know?
But OJ seems to stick in America's craw. They can't get over it. So they focus their hatred on him personally, rather than the real problem, which is that the prosecution fucked up miserably and the wealth and relative celebrity of the defendant was rather directly used to influence the outcome of a murder trial. (Also that the whole thing was a total media fiasco from day one, giving insight into the fundamentally flawed cable news enterprise years before its nadir as the propaganda wing of BushCo.)
I'm not saying this is true of all Americans. But it seems to pop up sometimes in odd ways. Here's Bill O'Reilly:
"Here's a man many believe did kill those two Americans, Nicole Brown Simpson being mother of his two children. Yet Simpson is participating in a project that is exploiting the murders. Shamefully, the Fox Broadcasting Unit is set to carry the program, which is simply indefensible, and a low point in American culture. For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel."
Many believe did kill those two Americans? OJ's American. What, is Bill O'Reilly now a crusader against American-on-American crime? What if they were from Bolivia? It would have still been wrong, right Billy? (Also, that shit about Fox Broadcasting having nothing to do with Fox News Channel? Yeah, it's not true.)
You think Bill O'Reilly's upset because OJ is a murderer? He's never seemed to care about shocking, deplorable violence before unless he sees an opening for a little attention. Here's Bill making light of Bush's favored abuse techniques, mocking whiny liberals who dare oppose Dear Leader and generally supporting our right to hold potentially innocent men against their will for years at a time and torture them.
So, yeah, torture, no big deal. Get over it, pansies. But OJ Simpson on the Television! That crosses the line!
I mean, this Fox TV special horseshit is 10,000 kinds of wrong. You don't put murderers on TV so they can get thinly-veiled confessions off their chest for fun and profit. You just don't air that sort of thing if you have any class or if you are a corporation concerned with how sane poeple will consider your brand from that point on. I mean, this tarnishes the brand identity of the Fox corporation, which is a company that's exclusively about their brand identity. Cause it sure as shit ain't their quality prime-time programming.
But an OJ half-confession is not the most upsetting thing to happen this month. We're in the midst of an evolving environmental calamity the likes of which few non-scientists can even really comprehend. We're caught in the middle of a dystopian nightmare-conflict we created that's responsible for a body count in the hundreds of thousands. Our President, after promising to work with the Democrats to compromise on key national issues, has decided he'd rather not play nice and plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis over judicial nominees. We're still kidnapping people, imprisoning them and torturing them.
This is frightening shit and it's all real and it matters a hell of a lot more than any fucking stupid crap OJ could possibly ever write. I don't care if OJ's penned a sequel to "Madame Bovary" that's twice as good as the original. He should eat shit and die. The OJ thing lingers because the racism thing lingers. And America, I've got to ask, do you have to let it linger? Do you have to? Do you have to? Do you have to let it linger?
[NOTE: Want proof that Americans, particularly Americans with power over other Americans, still act on their fundamentally racist impulses? Here are some UCLA Campus police officers tormenting an Iranian-American US citizen with a taser gun. Don't watch this video if the idea of a group of cops standing around barking orders at an innocent young man who simply didn't have his student ID, who's screaming out in pain with each new electrical charge sounds like something you can't handle. It's shocking and brutal and stomach-turning and it makes me want to mail them back my diploma with a request for a full tuition refund. I'm not using it anyway.]
5 comments:
The Scott Peterson murder and trial and Robert Blake's and the Menendez Bros. were all media circuses that had air time similar if not quite the equal of O. J. Simpson, and none of those defendants were black.
Of course, Peterson and the Menendez boys were convicted and therfore fell off the media radar. Blake was acquitted, but he wisely went back to the semi-obscurity he enjoyed prior to his trial. None of them has tried to exploit their infamy with some ghost written book, though that maybe because no publisher or media outlet evinced any interest.
The Simpson case continues to have legs because even after a liftime of experience telling them otherwise, most people still want to believe that justice will always prevail over criminals and Simpson is such a highly visible rebuke to that belief.
If Simpson had become a recluse after his acquittal, I seriously doubt that his story would keep getting resurrected every few years, but it is Simpson who continues to pop up and flaunt the fact that he was clearly guilty yet enjoys freedom that grinds people.
It's a wound that never heals over, because here comes Simpson to remind people how he goes around living the life of a middle-aged playboy, therby ripping he scab off again and again.
If you or I spit on the sidewalk, we get beaten with a nightstick but Simpson rides around on his golf cart and goes to discos and bangs stupid wannabe Nicoles.
It's not the race card. It's the manifest injustice that inflames people.
Obviously, if Simpson didn't make himself available to the media, there wouldn't be much left to report, so it would fade away. I don't see how that proves there isn't a strong racial element to this outrage.
I mean, would you say the obvious fact that Lana Clarkson was murdered by Phil Spector captured the public's attention? It was on the news, off and on, for a few weeks. He was famous. He was definitely guilty. Who cares, right?
Obviously, race is not the only factor that makes people angry about OJ. The fact that he's so arrogant, even after his public disgrace, has a lot to do with it. The fact that he continues to profit from infamy. I'm just saying that, when Bill O'Reilly starts to get really fumed about something, it's not because of a miscarriage of justice. Miscarriages of justice give that guy a hard-on.
Two quick points.
1. Phil Spector hasn't been tried yet. If he has a trial that turns into a media circus and goes on for weeks and weeks and has some lingering aftermath, we can compare it to Simpson. Otherwise, it's not a valid analogy.
2. Using the fact that O'Reilly fumes over something to prove its validity is fallacious. O'Reilly gets fumed about something evry day. That doesn't make it important. He makes the "War on Christmas" his end of the year hobbyhorse, and it's a fictitious phenomena.
As is obvious from my comments here, elsewhere and on my own blog, I'm a fairly progressive guy, politically. However, I think that constantly applying racism as the one size fits all explanation whenever there's a social phenomenon involving a non-white person is a mistake that overstates the significance of race and also prolongs racism by making people obsessively race conscious.
Seriously, Peter? You think that a not guilty verdict for Spector would touch off a frenzy of anger and rebuke like the OJ verdict? I'd say, regardless of the present status of the legal case, that's a solid example of a celebrity homicide in which most Americans are not emotionally invested. And never will be. He's a footnote. He could kill five more B-movie actresses and still not get suburban whites fired up like Johnny Cochran. Most people I know are still more upset with him over "Long and Winding Road" than Lana Clarkson.
Also, I meant to throw this out before, but your Robert Blake analogy seems to boost my point, not yours. Blake in all likelihood got away with a murder and then did a series of TV interviews about the case. Did people call it "disgusting"? Did network affiliates around the country refuse to run the footage? Did cable news anchors attack their own employers? A week later, no one could even tell you the name of Blake's victim or the Italian restaurant at which they dined the night of her death).
Clearly, there's no way to prove that anger over the OJ verdict derives largely from race or other factors. But I just don't buy the miscarrige of justice argument. Americans don't care about wrongfully convicted men on death row, they don't care about "enemy combatants" getting a fair trial, they're unmoved by the eradication of habeas corpus and they dodge jury duty like it's a Paul W. S. Anderson Film Festival. They're not overly concerned with justice so long as the right kinds of people get punished.
And because race was such a large, archetypal issue surrounding the entire case, I think it's safe to assume that Americans feelings about race in some way led to their vindictive rage. It's just a theory, but it's hardly an outrageous or impossible one.
Cory, in a lot of ways I agree with you, but let us not forget that Johnny Cochran did not pull "racism" out of the air randomly as a defense for his client. The LAPD is, in fact, a racist organization filled with racists. The officer who found a lot of key evidence was himself a known racist. All you need to do is watch that video of the Iranian-American kid being electrocuted to see this idea in action.
It was Cochran's job to do everything he could to defend his client. In most cases, Americans seem to accept that, and though there is an image of the sleazy ambulance-chasing defense attorney, I think most Americans know that's not how the profession really works. (The principle, after all, is supposed to be that it's better to let a guilty man go than jail an innocent man. Do Americans still believe in this concept?)
Now...this racism doesn't make OJ innocent. Most reasonable people know that. (Read Vincent Bugliosi's excellent "Outrage" for some insight into both of these ideas - OJ's guilt and the woeful incompetence of LA's police officers and prosecutors that resulted in this aquittal.)
But it does indicate, to me, that there's more going on here beneath the surface than people simply being upset that a murderer got away. (Why aren't people still upset with Chris Darden and the Los Angeles DA's office? They all wrote books and gave interviews.)
Race is such a complex, unspoken issue in America. I don't think it's compartmentalized the way you both seem to - that people can take a step back and think about a controversial criminal case logically without resulting to racial stereotypes and biases.
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