Pop Culture for $1,000, Alex
I used a 20 minute drive in the car with the girl to tell her everything I knew about O.J. Simpson and the infamous O.J. Simpson trial. She was born two years after the murders took place; a year after the verdict was handed down. She missed everything when I happened to see most of the trial only because it was televised and there was a television several feet away from me as I worked that season. It was a slow season. I saw most of the trial.
I started with the murders (she loves a good murder story), followed with the slow car chase, (”He did it!” she cried, “why else would he do that?”), covered all the personalities; remember these guys?:
- Chris Darden
- Marcia Clark (I described their jobs)
- Johnny Cochran (and his, and the fact that he died a while ago, of cancer)
- Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman (the victims, of course)
- The Simpson children
- Judge Lance Ito
- O.J. Simpson (she didn’t have a frame of reference, so I had to tell her how he was once a beloved football player, an actor, someone people admired.)
I got through to the verdict and the civil trial (on which I’m a little fuzzy, since by then the girl was an infant, but I knew that O.J. had to pay the Goldman’s, like a gazillion dollars) I couldn’t believe how much of this business I remembered but I told her everything: “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit!” I could. She wavered back and forth on her own verdict, wanted to retry the guy (I explained that was impossible) and find some way to find the “true killers,” uh, that is, if we don’t all ready know who that is. Mostly, she felt badly for the kids who are now adults.
The new vocabulary she learned? Motive: she defined as the jealous rage that O.J. must have had over Ron Goldman and his ex-wife. Alibi: “that’s like when you’re at a party with your friends across town and couldn’t have been at the scene of the crime, and there are pictures to prove you were there, and not at the scene at the time. Right, mama?”
I have to think of some other scene from the past to recreate for her the next time we have 20 minutes in the car to ourselves.
September 10th, 2006 at 12:28 am
The verdict when back and forth within twenty minutes.
My switch took years.
I remember the verdict, very vividly. Several dozen people at my school, huddled around a TV in the library. I was one of the very few there disappointed by the verdict.
Even still, I think our society has a “gut feeling” that OJ got away with murder.
But as I got older, developed first and interest in the law and then in criminal defense, and as I studied police behavior and expectations, chains of evidence, etc., it became clear that the not guilty verdict was the correct one, if only because of gross negligence by the LAPD.
Now, I imagine I’m one of the few people who was in the room that day that agrees with the criminal verdict, and that most people who cheered at his acquittal actually now think he should have been found guilty.
Funny, that learnin’ stuff is.
September 10th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Back then, I would never have guessed that the trial would have the far-reaching implications that it did.
I never imagined that it would be endemic to the collective memory of our generation.
September 11th, 2006 at 10:07 am
Since Dan mentioned the sad work of the LAPD, I can’t believe you didn’t mention Mark Fuhrman and (my personal favorite) Kato Kaelin! That is so strange, now, that took up so much of our lives, whether we wanted it to or not. You could not get away from it no matter how hard you tried.
I was a teacher then, and my friend that taught 5th grade, said that one of her students asked if they were going to have to change the name of orange juice, since the name “OJ” was like a four-letter word. (Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, obviously)