I've really always been curious as to why some people are obsessed with O.J. Simpson. I mean, I remember being in middle school and class being held up so we could listen to the radio of the verdict, and I remember everyone celebrating, and I remember being that bougie mixed kid who just didn't quite get why the whole thing was so important to either side, but I can't say that I ever really cared deeply about O.J. or his fate. I got it as I got older: black folks wouldn't have cared about O.J. if it had just been O.J. on trial, but unfortunately some people wanted it to be much deeper than that. They got their wish.
O.J. was recently locked up for good, and you get the sense that Jonah Goldberg is really disappointed that black people aren't very upset about it (via Jesse Taylor):
Now Simpson is finally going to prison. Alas, not for murder but for, among other things, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping. This time everyone appears pleased. The evidence against Simpson is hardly more damning than the billion-to-one DNA evidence last time. Yet no one sees Simpson as a victim or symbol this time, which is odd.
Given that Barack Obama's every utterance seems to spur the minting of a new commemorative plate to the cause of racial progress, you'd think more would be made of this moment.
You have to love Goldberg's sarcastic, Giuliani-like paean to the "commemorative plate" of "racial progress". He doesn't really get why a black man getting elected in a country that ended Jim Crow fifty years ago is a big deal, but he thinks he has to act like it matters. He just can't do so with any sincerity.
To be fair though, I wouldn't say "no one" sees the new O.J. verdict as a symbol, because clearly Jonah Goldberg does. Of what, exactly? Well it's just proof that in a country where 1% of the entire population languishes in prisons and jails, it's finally safe for a white guy to celebrate a black man getting thrown in jail without getting called a racist. Now that is some real progress.
--A. Serwer
