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November 15, 2006
completely there and freaky
It's strange to think he is going to confess:
LOS ANGELES - In a new TV interview and book, O.J. Simpson discusses how he would have committed the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend "if I did it."The two-part television interview, titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened," will air Nov. 27 and Nov. 29 on Fox, the TV network said Tuesday.
"O.J. Simpson, in his own words, tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes," the network said in a statement. "In the two-part event, Simpson describes how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade."
"This is an interview that no one thought would ever happen. Its the definitive last chapter in the Trial of the Century," Mike Darnell, executive vice president of alternative programming for Fox, said in a statement.
The interview, conducted with book publisher Judith Regan, will air days before Simpson's new book, "If I Did It," goes on sale Nov. 30. The book "hypothetically describes how the murders would have been committed," the network said.[full story]
I guess there are no double jeopardy issues here.
I don't recall celebrating the OJ verdict (anyone who was there can write in to correct me), although I do remember being amazed in a caffeinated, too-much-cable kind of way that he got off, and was also impressed by the skill Cochran and Co's displayed while getting the unlikely verdict. I think I might have tried to square various circles by declaring my belief in OJ's guilt while also pointing out that this was a highly anomalous outcome in terms of black men and the judicial system, talk that in retrospect strikes me as being in poor form. I definitely wasn't one of those people who vilified Cochran or his defense strategy. Those guys fulfilled the role given them to fulfill by the adversarial system; it's not their fault the prosecuters were chumps.
The most ignoble conversation I remember having about OJ was a drunken one wherein I polled people on the question of what they would do were they ever to wake up from a rage fugue covered in their blonde ex-trophy-wife's blood. Turn themselves in? What if they were reasonably sure it was a one-time lapse? What if they couldn't really remember what happened or how?
I don't really want to watch his confession, but I would be interested in looping extreme slow-mo of his face while he says or almost says or doesn't say "I did it," this just to track minute shifts in his facial expression and demeanor. I actually met OJ once in Las Vegas, bumped into him really in a doorway, and it turned out that one of my party had gone to school or something with his oldest son Jason. (Small black upper middle class + world.) OJ reached out to shake all our hands the way a father reaches out to shake the hand of any buddy of his son's, and us being (despite all appearances and later degeneracy) well-trained boys from nice homes, we all all instinctively reciprocated.
I wasn't the first to touch him but I remember him moving down our tiny little recieving line towards me and thinking: I'm about to shake the hand of a murderer. Was that the hand he used? Was that the one the bloody glove didn't fit on? The one he held up on television to the entire world? OJ's body was a wreck from what I imagined were football injuries, his shoulders and hip motion truncated and off, but the handshake was relatively firm and unembarrassed. He seemed excited at the chance to play the father running into (relative) kids in a foyer as opposed to his usual gig - racial footnote, punchline, double murderer. When I've told the story of "The OJ Handshake" I have on occasion claimed to have experienced Profiler-style flashes of the murder scene, but that's an exaggeration. What actually happened is that, while I had always claimed to believe he was guilty, I became finally and irrevocably sure of it when I touched him. His guilt was like a static discharge, completely there and freaky.
Posted by ebogjonson in media, memory, on November 15, 2006 2:16 PM
Comments
I thought (was hoping) that this was a joke, at first. I can't believe anyone would write a book like this, let alone that anyone would publish it (although I guess from the "bottom line" point of view, it makes a lot of sense).
I don't remember celebrating the verdict either... I deliberately also didn't follow the trial gavel to gavel, though. I hated the circus atmosphere and racial aspects of it, and also how much some people seemed to have invested in it. It was almost like some sort of national tug of war or something... very strange.
The completely there and freaky handshake guilt is... well, a bit freaky.
Posted by: Nanette at November 15, 2006 2:59 PM
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