A Focal Point of Racism, Domestic Violence, Injustice, and History

Update: thanks again to Driftglass for sharing this at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. P.S. suck it trump, your Trial of the Century begins Monday!

News broke today on the passing of O.J. Simpson.

A sports celebrity from the early 1970s - a running back at a time when such players were icons - Simpson converted that fame into an acting career by the 1980s defined by his natural charisma. Right up until June 1994 when his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were found murdered at her place.

At that moment, the United States - indeed the world - was falling into a strange new territory of instant media craving for stories, alongside the collapse of the Cold War shifting historical trends in unknown directions. We'd just had CNN and cable news gaining acceptance through its coverage of the First Persian Gulf War where the U.S. pounded Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. We were getting more cable networks springing up filling niche interests including criminal justice and true crime scandals. Syndicated celebrity shows and daytime tabloid talk shows were filling the airwaves. We were just barely getting the Internet up to speed to fill in all the rumors and speculation among the masses.

It was also a time of massive racial upheaval, not just in the Los Angeles metro where the Brown Simpson and Goldman murders took place. The Rodney King police brutality trial two years earlier had shocked the nation when the jury acquitted four police officers - even with them caught on tape pummeling King to near-death - and the city of L.A. erupted into riots. The violence exposed a raw nerve, the racial divide of the United States re-emerging in a post-Civil Rights Era and reminding us just how embedded racism is in our nation's psyche.

All of these factors were in play as the media coverage went into hyperactive as OJ became a prime suspect in the murders, as the narrative consumed everyone's attention right up to the point where OJ tried to flee the police in a suicidal fugue. The Bronco Chase - broadcast live by helicopter reporters - entered memetic folklore.

I know. I saw it. I watched the madness on television as it happened, and I - like millions of others - couldn't look away. It became An Event: akin to the JFK assassination, the Moon Landing, Nixon's Resignation, the Challenger disaster, the Fall of the Berlin Wall. (It would echo in later events like the night Princess Diana died) History as it happened. 

With my background in journalism, I watched with a mixture of contempt, alarm, and bemusement as it all exploded into a "Trial Of the Century", more three-ring circus than an attempt to uphold justice for grisly murders. Everybody covered it: Even Doonesbury got into the act. It permeated every layer of our nation.

What the trial revealed were lessons our nation and our legal system never seemed to learn from. For all the evidence of Simpson's involvement in the deaths - the history of domestic violence towards Nicole that exposed a deeply jealous and violent man - Simpson was able to use his wealth to hire lawyers who knew how to game the system and cast doubt on forensics, and played his celebrity status to sway a jury. The acquittal revealed a nation divided by race where White communities were certain that OJ would be found guilty, and Black communities bought into the defense's argument that the LAPD - staffed with racist detectives - tampered with evidence in order to send "another Black man" to prison.

We're still coping with a legal system that still doesn't take domestic violence serious enough to protect women, and a legal system that still creates distrust of law enforcement every time an unarmed Black person gets gunned down or beaten up by cops.

I read a Vox article by Constance Grady that covers the impact of what the OJ Trial wrought:

The trial of the century was a lightning rod for sociopolitical commentary. Feminists argued that it was a matter of public record that Simpson had stalked and beaten his ex-wife, and that if law enforcement had taken the problem seriously and made the proper interventions, Brown would still be alive. Simpson’s lawyers argued that he was being unjustly targeted because the police could not stand to see a Black man be successful, and they wanted to tear him down. The argument was potent enough that support for Simpson fell strongly along racial lines. A Los Angeles Times poll found that Black people were more than four times more likely than white people to think Simpson was not guilty...

Simpson’s celebrity was, perhaps, able to protect him from a guilty sentence in criminal court. Yet the act of cashing in his social capital in such a way seems to have transformed fame into infamy. There was a kind of hole in the fabric of American culture where a hero used to be, and it was hard to know what stood in its place now. After the long run of trials, Simpson was no longer the kind of figure that rental car companies wanted promoting their product. He had lived off his reputation for a long time, and now that reputation had changed...

The story of O.J. Simpson has become an American morality tale, a myth. It is the story of how all our national sins converged into a single terrible crime. Even after the man at the center is gone, the sins persist...

Even with the acquittal, Simpson could not return to the celebrity life, too toxic for film/television and for the sports world that once feted him. The criminal trial led into a civil trial for wrongful death by the victims' families, and in that OJ was found liable, forcing him to sell whatever he could to pay the legal bills. It led to an infamous attempt to publish his side of the story If I Did It, an act that even his staunchest defenders flinched away from: It ended up under the editorial control of Goldman's parents who made sure the subtitle of the book read Confessions of the Killer.

In the meantime, the media circus that consumed the world back in 1994-95 heralded a new world dominated by immediate information. With the advent of cell phone cameras, the ability to record a moment - even a snapshot - as it happened and sending it across the globe became possible. Smartphones became news cameras on the front lines. The impact - no, the hype - of the OJ sensationalism seems so quaint now.

And speaking of Trials of the Century...

You're next, trump. Welcome to history as it happens.

The Failure of Us All When It Comes to Angry Guys

There is a lot of rage to go around.

There is rage in the heart of Ray Rice, which led him back in February to punch his then-fiancee Janay Palmer so hard that he knocked her unconscious.

There is no other way to describe it.  When he slams that fist into her face, driving her head into the nearby elevator handrail.  Letting her lie there, unmoving, while you can see on the video that Ray is still talking at her.  Look at that body language.  He is not asking if she is alright.  He is taunting her.  The act of a bully, laying the smack-down on his victim.  The body language of an Angry Guy venting his hate.

We are, as fans and as a nation, still raging at those in power who ignored the evidence, tried to play down the horror, who lied at some point during this scandal, who tried to get back to doing what they want to do (sell us a product to make sh-tloads of money).  Much like Keith Olbermann, I too want to see every person involved in this poor cover-up - all the way up to NFL Commissioner Goodell - either reprimanded or fired for trying to hush up yet another violent attack by a player on a woman.

Ray Rice is not the first player to mistreat a woman: there have been so many (hi, Ben "Alleged Sexual Assaults" Roethlisburger, hi Rae Carruth!) through the years that we seem to equate sexual assaults and misconduct as part of the package deal with school and pro athletes.  Which isn't entirely true, as most players - of any sport - don't go this far attacking women or other people.

But it's viewed as part of the culture: the entitlement, the perks of being famous and athletic and physically fit, the perks of the big contracts and the glamour and the media attention.  It's also viewed as part of the nature of sport itself: a level of physical competition that would explain away the quick reaction of a guy in a heated argument to go with fists first into any conflict.

Except that we live in a world where it's not just athletes beating up - and killing - women.  There are reports every day of at least one domestic violence incident involving men who are not football players but businessmen, teachers, bus drivers, architects, blue-collar repairmen... even judges.  And while everyone's burning Ray Rice's jersey right about now, nobody is calling for that Alabama judge Mark Fuller to resign or get disbarred as a response to his anger-driven violence upon his wife.

We live in a global world of violent patriarchy: culture after culture after culture where women are abused, enslaved, treated like cattle, murdered.  And despite all of the differences between each culture - between Asia to Europe to Africa to North America to South America - there remains the same base reason.

The men inflicting all this rape and pain and horror are driven by anger.  Frustrated, violent, lashing out.  It doesn't matter if the man lashes out with a whip, with a machete, with a gun, with his own fists.  The power and impulse driving each act of violence is the same.  Anger.  That the targets are mostly women tend to be due to how some of our cultures devalue women, viewing them as trophies or property rather than people.  But the base cause of anger is always there.

We may want accountability from the people in power who failed Janay that February and are failing her now (if she's defending her now-husband Ray, it's for the same reasons every battered wife will give: she's both terrified of how he'll react if she says otherwise, and she's somehow convinced he's getting better...).  But we should also be demanding action from those same people in power.  We should be demanding it among ourselves.

We have got to do something about culling back the Angry Guys of our world.  We have got to cure this Angry Guy Syndrome of violence that threatens us all.