Out of Bounds

     O. J. Simpson, NFL first round draft pick in 1969, Buffalo Bills running back--one season in San Francisco--and star of fourteen theatrically released films, has been entertaining us for about fifty years.  His clumsy cop role, Nordberg in the three Naked Gun movies, brought mirth to this writer.  When I saw them, I didn't know yet about Simpson's most famous role to come: accused ex-wife-murderer.  1995's "trial of the century," a televised hit, lasted eight months, resulting in Simpson's acquittal.
     To this day, I don't know the truth of the matter.  The assailant, Simpson or someone else, knifed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman to death.  Simpson explained the scar on his finger as the result of hearing about her death.  He said he was holding a glass with a beverage.  The news of his ex-wife's murder upset him so much, he claimed, that he squeezed the glass, shattering it.  I've long regarded this story as made up, simply because it's so Hollywood, something out of a movie.  That being his (possibly fanciful) explanation for the finger cut, I believe the small wound was caused by the circumstances of a different situation: Simpson engaging in a fight (involving a sharp knife) with Ron Goldman, a healthy young man defending his friend Nicole.  
     Still, that finger cut story of Simpson's nagging at me is just a deduction based on a belief, not evidence.  There are other elements of concern regarding Simpson's possible guilt, such as Nicole's call four days before her murder to a shelter for women suffering domestic abuse.  From evidence not admitted in court, Nicole told the shelter worker that O.J. Simpson was "stalking her."
     These tidbits don't point to guilt, but for me, information that sticks out in an odd way, like the CIA initially claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't interrogated by them when he returned to the United States after defecting to the Soviet Union (an incredible claim later proved false), makes me wonder sometimes about official versions of the truth.  Today, news of Simpson's parole board granting him a release from prison in October (he's served nine years for participating in an armed robbery), occupied many hours of cable news screen time.  Gray-haired, seventy years old, he plans to live with his eldest daughter in Florida for a while.  Pundits, including Alan Dershowitz, one of his lawyers in 1995, advise Simpson through the distance of television that he should "just vanish.  Don't call attention to yourself.  Live an anonymous life."
     Impractical advice for a man who will require a great deal of money, since he owes approximately fifty-two million dollars in damages, determined in the civil suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families.  What's anonymous O.J. supposed to do?  Get a normal job?  A cook?  A cab driver?  A tour guide?  Dershowitz suggested that he not do any interviews.  Is it likely Simpson will not have a sit down with a prominent TV newsperson this fall after he's released from prison?  He'll need money.  Even without the millions he owes to the Brown and Goldman families, Simpson will need money to return to at least a small level of comfort; to have his own house, to play golf, to hobnob, to return to some degree of prominence, which was granted to him by the news media today by covering his parole hearing in full, something not done for Charles Manson, whose hearings have been periodic for decades, a colorful lunatic who qualifies as a truly remarkable killer.
     Simpson, however, is a star: as an NFL running back, a movie and TV actor, as someone the rich and famous (like Donald Trump) enjoyed partying with, as an accused murderer acquitted by a system that let him off partly because he was rich.  After 1995, he played golf, continued exhibiting the arrogance and cockiness of a man who at least knows he made it through an excruciatingly difficult legal process.  In the twenty-first century, Simpson became more desperate for recognition, producing a book, a "hypothetical confession," called If I Did It.  Here was Simpson saying, "I didn't kill her and her friend, but had I done so, this is how I would've done it."  The bizarre book was published but the profits went to the Brown and Goldman families.
     In 2008, in Las Vegas, Simpson and a friend participated in a pathetic attempt to "recover" Simpson-based sports memorabilia from a dealer in that trade.  Simpson's friend brought a gun, a detail that added years to O.J.'s prison sentence.  Again, we saw Simpson, but this time in the sartorial garb of a prisoner, facing a judge and getting the hard law thrown his way in a much less complicated case than the 1994 murders.  Simpson went to prison while George W. Bush was president and he'll get out during the Trump era.  What Trump thinks about his former friend getting out is anyone's guess.  The president probably appreciates anyone who can occupy a news cycle, blanking out, at least for a few hours, the relentlessly bad stream of news about a world leader who wanted, in 2008, before Simpson got arrested, to put O.J. in Celebrity Apprentice, bragging to radio host Howard Stern that such a move would make huge ratings.
     Simpson attended Trump's wedding to Marla Maples in December 1993.  Five months later, he either cut his ex-wife's throat, or he didn't.  Simpson by the time of the wedding had already hit his wife, domestic abuse charges filed against him in 1989.  Today I saw a photo of Trump at his wedding, O.J. Simpson next to him, the current president holding his twelve year old daughter Ivanka closely before him by the arms.  By then, according to Trump's first wife Ivana in her divorce deposition, he had beaten and raped her after receiving a bad haircut, a claim she later, not under oath, retracted.  In domestic abuse cases, I believe the women almost always aren't making up their stories.  The photo at Trump's second wedding shows two men, both wife abusers, both bullshitters, both rich, in positions of dominance over less fortunate others and also over justice itself.
     Today, some Republican senators, who all, servile-fashion, supported Trump in 2016, speak of their doubts about a president who doesn't seem to understand how justice in this country works.  Trump has spoken against Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal from the Russia investigation, bitching about Sessions not bringing up the recusal issue when Trump first considered him for the job.  Whatever the reason for Sessions' not mentioning his closeness to the Russia boondoggle, he was right in recusing himself--a punch in the jaw to Trump's concept of loyalty, an emotional response suited to a dictator.
     The photo of Trump and Simpson simply shows men who walk all over people and think nothing of it.  That decent human beings have problems with such behavior is merely an annoyance to them, something to find contemptible, to be ridiculed.
     If Simpson did kill two people in 1994, Trump has already killed thousands with bombs and missiles.  Their court of justice may not come until some afterlife arena of judgment, a place only makers of fiction can imagine.  Simpson, too, strikes me as a fiction-maker.  That story about breaking the glass and suffering the mysterious cut on the finger attached to the hand that gripped the football when he ran all those thousands of yards in glory days is also, I suspect, fiction.  If he lied about that cut, he killed his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.
     Trump is the kind of man who, to increase ratings and make money, would have put the author of If I Did It on his glitzy tacky show.  Trump and Simpson, entertainers both, have given us ample examples that they are scum.  Yet, we give them the power accrued that comes from attention, and we wonder why things in America are always fucked up.

                                                                              Vic Neptune