Dear Friend and Reader,
There’s a saying I picked up while living in Dublin that doesn’t go down very well State-side, but it’s apt for today’s news, so I’m going to use it despite the misinterpretation and consternation that I’m speaking negatively about breasts — I would never.
Everything is going tits up (slang for “completely failed so as to become inactive”).
I’ll try to limit my definition of “everything,” for now, to: the environment, the McCain/Palin ticket and OJ Simpson. And, since it’s Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement (also known as the day I tell my grandparents I’m fasting while I munch quietly on a bagel), I’ll deal with this list Hebrew style: right to left.
It’s not often I feel sympathy for murderers, but I actually feel bad for OJ Simpson. Imagine you’re a black man who murders his white ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend in a jealous rage, and you, by the miracle of god and, well, lots and lots of money, get away with it. Considering the fear of black-on-white violence in America, combined with the fact that 39.5 percent of inmates are black, while they only make up 12.8 percent of the total US population and the fact that he was guilty, OJ got pretty lucky.
The OJ Simpson murder trial went on when I was 11, and I remember walking home from school, making myself a disgusting snack that I could only get away with in the 30 minutes before my mom got home from work (popcorn drenched in butter, giant plate of pretzels with cheese melted in the microwave?!), and watching the details of it on the news. Everyone was obsessed with it: everyone at school, in the grocery store, The New York Times, the tabloids.
At first, I was into it because it was the murder trial of the Naked Gun guy (33 1/3 was released the year before). But then I was engrossed for the same reason as the rest of the country. We were obsessed because we knew. We KNEW he did it.
And when he got off, when that bloody glove was inadmissible, we were shocked, because it was the most obvious loss of justice. He swore to search for the rest of his life for the true killers. “Instead,” as The Statesmen writes in its op-ed, “he has spent inordinate time over the last decade searching amid the nation’s golf courses and resorts.”