993) WHY WE OBSESS

Because we are scientists, who can't help being appalled at this caricature of the scientific method. Because we are lawyers, who can't help being appalled at this parody of the legal mind. Because we are communicators, who can't help being appalled at what is being communicated here. Because we are teachers, who don't want to have to teach the true significance of what is being acted out here.

Because we cling desperately to the hope that "Equal Justice Under Law" is more than just a motto, but actually means something. And because we fear that, in the end, it may be the only fortress we (and our children) may have against an increasingly venal age. And because we recognize that the "rich man's" defense threatens that notion of equality to its very foundations.

Because we apprehend the wellsprings of emotion that the defense team has tried to tap into here, and put to such bastardized purposes. And because we know that those great themes (race, due process, the individual against the state, etc.) have nothing to do with the facts of this case, but if successfully exploited (in bastardized form) here, and broadly applied (in bastardized form) elsewhere, will ultimately amount to nothing more than a simple license to kill, available to anyone with the chutzpah - and the cash - to claim it. And because that license to kill is deeply, deeply threatening to us.

Because we, like most children of the modern age, have been supersaturated with advertising, commercialism, promotion, and hype, and have become profoundly cynical of it as a result. Because we recognize, to our horror, what Goebbels recognized: that human emotions are infinitely malleable, and capable of being put to any conceivable purpose with the right application of lies, hatreds, ignorance, and fear. And because we see those same propaganda methods being matter-of-factly employed here (in this latest version of the "thrilla in Manilla"), on multiple levels.

Because, like Kurtz, we travel in grim fascination to the heart of darkness, in order to know what true horror really is, lest we lose our innocence by default from our failure to recognize it. And because we know, on some level, that our own innocence somehow depends upon our willingness to look unflinchingly upon the ugliness, ugliness, ugliness of it all.

Because, as Americans have always been, we are profoundly ambivalent about heroism and villainy. Because we desperately need our heroes, and desperately need to see them ripped apart in calumny when they fall, as they surely must; and because we love our villains and love to hate them and hate to love them. And because outlawry is (perversely enough) one of the highest forms of artistic and heroic expression in America, and always has been. (Darth Vader? Billy the Kid? The Wild One? Petrified Forest? Bonnie and Clyde?)

Because we are all refugees of the sixties, and came away from that time with the idyllic vision that racial harmony was achievable; because we don't want to let go of that idyllic vision, and know that the "race card" being played here can only come to a bitter end, no matter what the outcome.

Because we know full well that a brutal, murderous, raging evil stalks the land, and are profoundly mesmerized by the utter banality with which that evil expresses itself in this courtroom. And because we foolishly imagine that our participation in it can somehow ennoble it above the banalities in which it is now mired.

Because this melodrama has everything that the dream machine could possibly hope to marshall, all in one script: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, violence, glamour, heroes, heroines, and villains, race, who-dunnit, sports, ritual, ignorance, greed, ineptitude, pride, politics, high-tech, history, stubbornness, Ben Matlock, Perry Mason and Grace Van Owen, insanity, farce, gospel, World War II, John Wayne, you name it. We've got it.

Tom Fellows
"Why We Obsess"
posted on the Court TV O.J. Simpson discussion board (5/31/95)

994) Another way to put it is this: The only obstacle to the establishment of the guilt of O.J. Simpson is legal. The whole of the epistemological apparatus of the modern world - psychology, science, logic, reason - establishes that he is guilty. Only the law stands in the way of the application, paradoxically, of justice.

William F. Buckley
"The DNA Is Persuasive: Will The Law Go Along"
op-ed in the New York Post (5/30/95)
posted by Sharon Rose on the Court TV O.J. Simpson discussion board (5/31/95)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 604 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.