All the hubub about the OJ confessional book and TV special and it's subsequent cancellation has inspired some interesting commentary. I have to agree that it's probably better (especially for the Simpson family) that the book didn't get released and that the special didn't go on air. I can clearly remember when he was aquited-I was doing my internship as a student teacher at Shorewood High School and overwhelmingly the kids cheered for the innocent verdict. To me, it was clearly a miscarriage of justice-of celberity over honor-wealth winning out again. It saddens me that so many people were so moved to harbor such misguided support for such a henious criminal, just because he is a celebrity.
In Salon Debra J. Dickerson suggests that OJ should have killed himself in the Bronco (this certainly would be the approach of a Japanese OJ):
How much better off we would all be, how precious that tiny shred of blessed ignorance about how far we haven't come might seem, had you, O.J., only been moldering in Forest Lawn these past dozen years. But you're alive, because you're a wuss -- a "remnant," as a girlfriend of mine scornfully calls the limping, deficient crop of men available to us as single mothers of a certain age. Like a herpes outbreak, here you are to plague us again. Since you won't die, who will finally, if only a tad, cleanse us all of the poison of injustice that infects us?
Perhaps a woman, an abuse victim, a medium who channels the battered everywhere, a virago in the original and true sense of the word. Judith Regan had to do what you and an army of lawyers, cops and filthy minded citizen-voyeurs couldn't.
Like most observers, I assumed that Regan, publisher of O.J.'s upcoming quasi-confession "If I Did It" and interviewer of Mr. Simpson on Fox for two separate hours on Nov. 27 and 29, was a bottom-feeding huckster willing to do anything for a dime. Or, I assumed that she was merely a bottom-feeder. But as I sat down to write this, I came to believe that, whatever her motivation, on some level she had to be focused on wringing a confession from the bastard, the only kind such a coward is capable of: a pitifully hypothetical one. Turns out, I was right in spades. I just hadn't known it was personal.
In Friday's New York Post, Regan comes out spitting and clawing and, frankly, breaking my heart. The pain and fury she suffered as an abused and unavenged wife sizzles on the page. In a self-penned article titled "Why I Did It," she writes, "I wanted the confession for my own selfish reasons and for the symbolism of that act." She says that her charming, accomplished, handsome first husband knocked her out and put her in the hospital. "I had once been that young woman ... who believed in the beauty of romance, the power of love ... Like Nicole Brown, I believed with all my heart ... and then got punched in the face." Ever since O.J.'s acquittal, which she predicted and which she watched, weirdly, in the company of Howard Stern, Regan says she has wanted some form of "conviction." "And if Marcia Clark couldn't do it, I sure wanted to try."
If it turns out Regan made any of this up, I may go O.J. on her myself and skip the suicide watch. But absent any proof to the contrary, and given the widespread and sadly unreported abuse of women generally, I believe her, as I never believed O.J. or trusted the proffered explanations of the bloodthirsty crowds calling for either his acquittal or his head. After a dozen years of abstinence, I will definitely be watching on TV next week as O.J. squirms and suffers and cowers before every woman ever pummeled anywhere by a sorry-assed man.
Turns out, it takes a white woman to clean up a racial mess she didn't make and drag us to where we should have been all along -- demanding justice. Nothing less, nothing more, nothing else. If Judith Regan is half the woman this coup hints at, by Christmas we may all be dancing on O.J.'s grave.
In Slate, Timothy Noah admits that he would still like to read the book and see the TV interview:
At the risk of proving this last point, let me state that those bootleg items can't turn up on the Internet fast enough to suit me. Yes, it's possible that this whole thing is a fraud—that Simpson's hypothetical confession is no such thing, but rather a tease or an evasion. I tend to doubt that, though, if only because the impulse even to tease would go a long way toward constituting a confession. (What innocent man would ever desire to participate in such an exercise? And incidentally, if the book turns out to be a 100 percent total fraud concocted by Simpson and Judith Regan, that's worth finding out, too.) Yes, it's true that if Simpson wanted to confess to the crime at this late date, it would be better if he did so directly to a law enforcement officer or a prosecutor. But that wouldn't spare us an ensuing media circus. Simpson's confession, assuming it is a confession, is news. It may also create an occasion for Simpson to be punished in some way for his awful crime.
Let's be clear. I despise O.J. Simpson as much as the next guy. But I despise him for killing the mother of his children and a perfect stranger in a pathologically jealous rage. I don't despise him for confessing to his crime, if that's what he did, or edging close to doing so. And I do not wish to avert my eyes from whatever it is he has to say for himself at this late date. To understand all is to forgive all, the old saying goes. But I don't want to understand. I just want to know what this son of a bitch has to say for himself. If anyone out there has a copy of this deplorable book, please consider sending it my way.
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