O.J. Simpson (1947-2024) died two months ago. Having had cause to mention him over 15 times on this blog, O.J. rates a post here, yet I wasn’t about to eulogize him, and I certainly don’t celebrate his birthday. So, as I did with Charles Manson, and will probably do with certain others, I mark his most awful day.
For those too young to have been there, it would be a grave mistake to undersell the import of what today may land in the consciousness of many as some kind of celebrity silliness. The People Vs. O.J. Simpson (2016), which I found a delightful hoot in spite of all, may create that impression. But my experience of the actual event was that it was a grave national trauma. I am precisely the right age and the right profile to have felt it as such. O.J. was a trophy-winning NFL running back, an idol and hero to kids, but then he ascended into Hollywood’s celebrity firmament. He was a prominent part of the fabric of American popular culture. He was beloved and looked up to. And, while some remain skeptical on this point, he was one of the first black Americans to break the color barrier, largely because of the careful attention he gave to his public image. Unlike most of the gridiron thespians of the ’70s and ’80s, he didn’t do blaxploitation movies, for example. He seemed to care a great deal about the impact he made on society. That’s what made the events of 30 years ago so harrowing and so painful.
On this day in 1994, O.J.’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman were stabbed to death outside her Brentwood home. I’m sure it made national news and O.J. may have been discussed in the media as a suspect, but what everyone remembers is what happened five days later, the weird slow-motion car chase, where O.J. and friend Al Cowlings loped along on an L.A. freeway in a Ford Bronco followed by police, with O.J. announcing his suicide (via a note Cowlings read to the media over a cell phone), and the entire world watching it live on television in real time. It was a kind of foreshadowing for the 21st century, one of the first times we were all electronically integrated, eyes and ears all pointed in the same direction.
The ’90s ought to have gone down in history as a glorious decade for so many reasons: the Iron Curtain fell, the Cold War was over, the internet was born, trade barriers were broken, the Hubble telescope was deployed. It ought to have been remembered as as a triumphant cap to the American Century. Instead, it was marred by the cultural blight of Trash TV, Newt Gingrich’s unprecedentedly lengthy and frequent shut-downs of the U.S. government, and a string of horrible national traumas which seemed to sock us in the guts every few months: the Rodney King beating and subsequent L.A. riots (1991-92), Woody Allen’s sex scandals with their whiffs of incest and pedophilia (1992), The World Trade Center bombing (1993), the Waco Siege (1993), the climax of the Unibomber campaign (1993-95), the Paula Jones scandal (1994), Kurt Cobain’s suicide (1994), the Oklahoma City Bombing (1995), the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics (1996), paparazzi literally hounding Princess Diana to her death (1997), the Lewinsky Scandal and Clinton impeachment (1998-99), and Columbine (1999). The Brown-Goldman murders and the subsequent O.J. trial was of a piece with all of these, equal to or worse than many of them in import.
And then the lengthy trial experience, which made unlikely media stars out of such diverse figures as the Kardashian family, Johnny Cochran, Kato Kaelin, Alan Dershowitz, Faye Resnick, Marcia Clark, Robert Shapiro. At the end of the circus, to the shock of many, O.J. was acquitted, though later he was found guilty in a civil trial and put on the hook for $33 million, which he avoided paying by moving to Florida (whose laws prevented the seizing of some of his assets).
As in the case of Michael Jackson, there were some who clung to his innocence almost religiously, in spite of a tidal wave of signs pointing to his guilt. What innocent person threatens suicide or attempts to evade an investigation, especially one with the means to hire the country’s top defense lawyers, as he later did? There were, by the way, DOZENS of recorded domestic violence incidents involving Simpson and Brown. It’s almost ALWAYS the husband in cases like this. And who writes a salacious book, as he did in 2006, called If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, in which he describes how he did it, including all the gruesome details of the murder as he experienced them? The book (a desperate money-making grab) was quickly quashed by a judge. A few months later O.J. was finally nabbed for armed robbery in a tawdry episode involving sports memorabilia, serving a decade in prison (2007-2017). As with Capone’s tax evasion, and for that matter Trump’s current “falsifying business records” beef, it was at bottom (I think) an instance of obtaining “justice by other means” — satisfying, if suboptimal.
At the time of Simpson’s murder acquittal, I was peeved at the result, and even had a rare argument with my sainted mother-in-law about it. I’ve since come around to her point of view. The basis of O.J.’s acquittal was not that he didn’t do it, for he surely did, but that a fair trial was impossible because the process had been poisoned by the racism of the LAPD. If you’re pissed at the verdict, don’t be mad at the judge, jury, or the lawyers on either side. Blame cops whose demonstrable biases against people of color create a situation where it can’t be claimed that the suspect is innocent until proven guilty, which is supposed to be the basis of our justice system. The minute you have anyone in authority declaring people guilty prior to that verdict, the process stinks, full stop. Until American law enforcement is fully purged of participants who think they know who’s guilty based on what people look like, justice — legal justice, anyway — is a lie. You don’t like that O.J. walked free? Blame the Mark Fuhrmans of this world.
(Travalanche) 
You must be logged in to post a comment.