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O.J. and Michael Richards Susan Estrich O.J. and the "N" word . . .
A country with no lines finally draws one, and she's it. Leave it to Judith.
Let me say at the outset that I've written two books for Regan books, and that its head, the aforementioned Judith, is a friend of mine.
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Let me add that if she'd called me and asked whether she should publish a book by O.J. and do a two-part special with him entitled "If I Did It," you would've heard my "No!" loud and clear. But she didn't need my permission. She needed other people's. To pretend she did this alone is fantasy.
Yet she's alone out there taking a bath when an entire decision-making structure in corporate America approved of this. And why wouldn't they?
This is, after all, a culture in which 9/11 widows are fair game for assault; Michael J. Fox's disease, fair fodder for ridicule; the president, a fictional character in an assassination plot.
In video games, prostitutes are raped and brutalized, then killed. That's a best seller. Grand Theft Auto — the names says it all . . . unfortunately. In rap music, women are called whores and are beaten and degraded, and those are just the words I understand.
I don't blame corporate Fox for treating this as a business decision and not a moral one in a culture in which everything is a business decision. If Ann Coulter can make it to No. 1 on the best-seller list by selling outrage against icons, why not? I'm the one who just a wrote a book (published by Judith) decrying the fact that there is no such thing as a line anymore. And then all of a sudden there is. O.J. It's almost quaint.
Since O.J., we've been through 9/11, got mired in Iraq, seen towers fall and hostages beheaded, lost over 2,000 brave young Americans, but the thought of that man in his Ford Explorer getting away with murder, what he did to them, and to us, continues to have the kind of power that almost nothing does in this country. Ka-boom. It's O.J. Why O.J.? Of all things . . .
What is striking, is that we still get so angry about one man getting away with murder, about the total failure of the justice system, exquisitely shared so universally, and yet not shared at all across the chasm of race. There is a moral standard we apply in the O.J. case that we don't apply in other places. Judith, in her defense, wondered why the same outrage had not greeted the many other famous "gets" in recent years, and part of the answer is that O.J. never paid the price, never earned a right to redemption. And part of it, too, is that her title was intended to bait her audience, and it worked — too well. The hypothetical, once posed, was irresistible, both in its appeal and its offensiveness.
Opposites, after all, are alike. We are most drawn to what we cannot abide. Her brilliance worked too well this time. In defining the irresistible, she defined the unacceptable. Who knew there was such a thing anymore? O.J. is the line that can't be crossed. Imagine if we started applying such moral scrutiny more broadly. Speaking of moral scrutiny, is there anyone who cares that Kramer is sorry? If you haven't followed the latest ranter, actor Michael Richards was heckled by two black men during a stand-up routine at the Laugh Factory, and he responded by calling them the "N" word repeatedly, doing his best Mel Gibson imitation, which he later described in his apology on the Letterman show as "free association," "spontaneous," "all over the place." Both the response and the apology were all those things. What is so difficult about the concept that you have a right to say what you want, but you're responsible for what you say? Especially when you have a microphone in your hand. The first amendment gives you the right to speak. It doesn't tell you what to say.
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Editor's note:
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