I Turned Off the TV During the O.J. "Chase".

The older I get, the more satisfied I am with who I am.
It's telling, but 20 years ago today? I was living in South Florida -- not an inside air-conditioner kinda gal, but preferring open windows and fresh ocean air --  and remember it being warm in my upstairs Singer Island apartment.

On tv, (it was still free back then, no special boxes or cable package needed), they were showing a slo-mo chase scene, back in the days before reality shows made "news!" out of nothing and nobodies.

I felt pretty bad for O.J. Simpson. Here he had killed his wife and the other guy and was fleeing, allegedly with a gun to his head. No doubt of his guilt -- he was pretty much suicidal, admitting what he'd done via his actions, and panicking.

At 5 p.m., Robert Kardashian, a friend of Simpson and one of his defense lawyers, read a rambling letter by Simpson to the media. In the letter Simpson sent greetings to 24 friends and wrote, "First everyone understand I had nothing to do with Nicole's murder ... Don't feel sorry for me. I've had a great life."

To many, this sounded like a suicide note, and the reporters joined the search for Simpson. According to Simpson's lawyer, Robert Shapiro, also present at Kardashian's press conference, Simpson's psychiatrists agreed with the suicide note interpretation; on television, the attorney appealed to Simpson to surrender.

At around 6:20 p.m., a motorist in Orange County saw Simpson riding in his white Bronco, driven by his friend Al Cowlings, and notified police. The police then tracked calls placed from Simpson on his cellular telephone. At 6:45 p.m., a police officer saw the Bronco going north on Interstate 405. When the officer approached the Bronco with sirens blaring, Cowlings yelled that Simpson was in the back seat of the vehicle and had a gun to his own head.

The officer backed off, but followed the vehicle with up to 20 police cars participating in the chase.
...
USC sports announcer Pete Arbogast and station producer Oran Sampson contacted former John McKay to go on the air and encourage Simpson to end the pursuit. McKay agreed and asked Simpson to pull over and turn himself in instead of committing suicide. LAPD detective Tom Lange, who had previously interviewed Simpson about the murders on June 13, realized that he had Simpson's cellular phone number and called him repeatedly.

A colleague hooked a tape recorder up to Lange's phone and captured a conversation between Lange and Simpson in which Lange repeatedly pleaded with Simpson to "throw the gun out the window" for the sake of his mother and his children. Simpson apologized for not turning himself in earlier in the day and responded that he was "the only one who deserved to get hurt" and was "just gonna go with Nicole."

Al Cowlings can be overheard on the recording (after the Bronco had arrived at Simpson's home surrounded by police) pleading with Simpson to surrender and end the chase peacefully. During the pursuit and without having a chance to hear the taped phone conversation, Simpson's friend Al Michaels interpreted his actions as an admission of guilt.
...
Simpson reportedly demanded that he be allowed to speak to his mother before he would surrender. The chase ended at 8:00 p.m. at his Brentwood home, 50 miles (80 km) later, where his son Jason ran out of the house, "gesturing wildly."

After remaining in the Bronco for about 45 minutes, Simpson was allowed to go inside for about an hour; a police spokesman stated that he spoke to his mother and drank a glass of orange juice, resulting in laughter from the reporters. Shapiro arrived and a few minutes later, Simpson surrendered to authorities.

In the Bronco the police found "$8,000 in cash, a change of clothing, a loaded .357 Magnum, a passport, family pictures, and a fake goatee and mustache." Neither the footage of the Bronco chase, the recorded calls between Lange and Simpson nor any of the items found in the Bronco was shown to the jury as evidence in Simpson's subsequent criminal murder trial.

The couple had kids, the media told us. The best thing that could happen for this man, I was certain, is that his friends -- one allegedly in the Bronco with him, others communicating with him directly -- would talk him back into reality, not killing himself, but turning himself in, and facing the consequences for his actions.

Twenty years ago today, I turned off the t.v.

Not my cup of tea, that kind of ... entertainment. I also remember back in those days turning off, and telling Mal to turn off or turn down at least, all the screaming scared women featured on so many of the drama shows. (Listen still today: you hear it as background noise.) Honestly? I could think up in my head more exciting, smarter, more passionate dramas than t.v. was then turning out. Maybe I'm just exceptionally imaginative like that.

Waste of time, consuming sloppily served non-nutrition passively like that. That's entertainment? (I also tend to be a naturally good eater, based on my family's bland but natural, real foods, diet; our family ate together. Even today, I'd rather eat nothing than eat crap, and don't mix all those processed sauces, condiments and cremes into my meals, please. Ruins the real food, covering it up like that.)

We all know how the O.J. Simpson saga played out.
I still think, his real friends would have encouraged him to face the truth, not do everything in his power to evade justice. Perhaps that's why I'm not first-rate legal material: I don't think lying, and spending money to lie to yourself, helps in the end.

If you pay enough today, you can buy your way out of legal troubles, but truthfully? You're only paying someone to take your troubles temporarily away. (Remember your college Dostoevsky? I was lucky enough to study his major works one quarter, under Prof. Irwin Weil* at Northwestern. O.J. Simpson, sadly, never had that advantage.)

It works the same way as some of these high-paying salaried jobs. The academic overachievers so often think they're being paid for their expertise, right out of school even. No, the longer I live, the more I realize they pay you those high salaries so you'll swallow and do the things that others would not see fit to do. Like a poor man laboring, except at those corporate rates, you're not selling your back so much, but often your soul.

Once you've got a family to support, forget about following your conscience. Now, your children need you, so you'll do what they ask at work, even if it hurts other innocent people.** They've pretty much got you, well paid and all, but not independent.

Like I say, the more I look around and see, the more I like who I've become. I shut off the t.v., and said a prayer for O.J. Simpson's family that day. Perhaps if he'd had better friends, Simpson would be a freer man right now -- still serving a prison sentence, but freer nonetheless.

Plus, there'd be the added bonus that we'd never ever had heard of the late Robert Kardashian, who surely sold his soul for his trial work "freeing" Simpson, or his wife or offspring.
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* From wiki:

Irwin Weil was born in 1928 in Cincinnati, Ohio of German Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His father Sidney was a former owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Initially majoring in economics at the University of Chicago, he was drawn to Slavic studies after discovering Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in a required literature course and being (in his words) "knocked for a loop". He reports that he ran to a bookstore, picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment, read it in two days, and resolved to learn the language of such a great body of literature.

Ah, the humanities!
Too bad the tenured folk of today buried these "dead white guys" in the past decades in order to open up more room for themselves at the universities, pursuing their side jobs and "diversity" equally.

** To me, this explains our earlier discussion of Marc Thiessen's political work. He's got four children now, and a wife who shills for the Senate Republicans. It's much, much too late for him to come clean and admit his complicity in the war crimes involved with invading Iraq, so he's got to double down and pretend he cares about the dead civilians he helped to kill through his white-collar actions.

Ditto for law professor Glenn Reynolds. They sold their independence a long time ago; I don't think those types could analyze a political or militaristic situation honestly now if their lives depended on it.

And of course, the results matter even less when you're gambling with other people's lives...

Wave your fingers in the air like you don't care...
Glide by the people as they start to look and stare
Do your dance, do your dance, do your dance quick mamma
Come on baby, tell me what's the word?

Word up, everybody say
When you hear the call, you've got to get it underway
Word up, it's the code word
No matter where you say it, you'll know that you'll be heard now

All you Insta DJ's who think you're fly;
There's got to be a reason and we know the reason why:
You try to put on those airs and act real cool...
But ya got to realize that you're acting like fools!

Word Up.