Other Voices, Other Rooms...
Other Backgrounds, Other Recollections.
Here's UW law professor Ann Althouse, remembering 20 years gone by:
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Her black commenter (and I do believe there is only one, actively participating there), wrote back:
"It was 20 years ago today that we watched a 90-minute TV show that consisted of a white SUV driving on an LA freeway. It was experienced as very exciting because the SUV contained a famous person and we were told that he was pointing a .357 Magnum at his head and maybe we'd get to see it live — a celebrity blowing his head off."
That perfectly captures why a large part of black America was crying. ... The "white" Bronco - holding a "running" black man and his best friend - followed by a fleet of slow-moving squad cars filled with overseers, lights ablaze, because of a dead white woman's body, all meant nothing?
It was just another celebrity, who might blow his head off. It HAS to be weird, to be THAT disconnected from our surroundings. I mean, I could spot the Scott Walker thing coming, from here, and I've never been to Wisconsin or anything.
You see O.J.'s travails and miss why were watching entirely.
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Ann writes in later to express her disappointment at the ending:
Ann Althouse said...- "We wouldn't have been able to see him blow his head off." Oh, yes. There was plenty of talk about how the drive was to get him to his home and there were cameras there ready to show him getting out of his car, and there was every reason to think that he would kill himself right there. I remember watching and feeling nervous about that, thinking I did not want to see that. That was very much a part of the show. When he got home, he simply walked from the car to the house, and that was the end of it. That then seemed strange, like: What were we watching? ------------------------------- When another commenter then writes in to tell her, indeed there was another response than passively watching, she counters with her good upbringing: "If you didn't want to see that and it was very much part of the show, why did you watch?" I didn't sit there watching the whole thing, and, in fact, my parents had emphasized the importance of not spectating at a disaster. They had lived through the Texas City disaster, shortly before I was born, and I owe my existence to their principle (as I have described on this blog at least once).
