GUILTY

I’ve recently competed binge-watching “The People Vs. OJ Simpson” on FX.  All in all, a pretty darn good series; well-acted, well directed and, in short, riveting. 

 

For those of us who remember the whole OJ circus as it was happening, the series really brings it all back. And when I say that, I mean the entire society-splitting, infotainment industry-spawning, cross-racial “spokespersoning” crazy stew. And it also brought back an over-arching truth to my mind that feels as accurate today as it did 20 years ago: EVERYONE, EVERY SIDE WAS GUILTY AS HELL.

 

·         Yes, OJ was guilty of murder.

·         Yes, his defense team were guilty of repeatedly playing the race card.

·         Yes, the prosecution was guilty of not being as talented as the defense team.

·         Yes, Mark Furman was guilty of being a colossal racist and a complete werewolf of a human being.

·         Yes, white America was guilty of proselytizing to black America about how it should and should not react to the case, the verdict and OJ.

·         Yes the LA Police Department was guilty of being completely untrustworthy at best and brutally racist and corrupt at worst.

·         Yes, every white person with a microphone and a TV or radio segment was guilty of acting as a non-credible spokesperson for how blacks think about black men and the legal system.

·         Yes, the vast majority of America was guilty for completely misreading the true nature of the verdict; the jury acquitted a famous celebrity who happened to be black, not a black person who happened to be famous.

·         Yes, every news network and news outlet was guilty of exploiting a tragedy for ratings and money and yes, every network decision maker was sleazy for doing so.

·         Yes, ESPN and similar organizations were guilty of launching their current fixation with mind-numbingly stupid off the playing field issues like “Deflate-gate” because of the success of OJ coverage.

·         Yes, America is guilty of a vapid and truly unhealthy fixation on celebrity culture that the OJ trail, at least inflamed if not created.

·         Yes, America was guilty of caring much more about literally everything and everyone related to the case than the actual victims Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

·         And finally, yes, we were all guilty of succumbing to our basest instincts during the trial; of watching the car race in hopes of seeing a fiery crash, of seeing the man on the ledge and shouting, “jump!”

 

Indeed the OJ Simpson Trial was a very unique window into the soul of America. And truth be told, looking inside that window was not a very pretty sight.

THE SUPER-RICH

“The rich are different,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

The Panama Papers and the fallout from the massive hack of information lays bare the truest truth about the super-rich: they don’t hide their wealth because they need to, they hide their wealth because they want to. Because, hey, that’s what the super-rich are supposed to do. Call it: “keeping up with the Jones’s – if the Jones’s are massively successful hedge fund managers with a dozen homes around the world and a Lamborghini collection that would make Jay Leno blush.

When money no longer functions as a tool, but instead becomes a precious thing unto itself, all nature of crazy accounting, off-shore deposits and shell corporations take hold.

I’m not rich. Chances are, you are not either. To us, money is a means to an end. To quote a great line from a great movie – The Jerk: “it’s not the money I’ll miss…it’s all the stuff!”

To us, money is the thing we need to buy groceries, pay a mortgage, pay the cable bill, possibly take the kids to Disneyland, etc.   Money gets us the stuff. Much of it is necessary stuff, like food or electricity or brakes for the car. A lot of it is also the fun stuff, like a TV, tickets to a show or a painting.

And we like it; the money equals stuff equation. We like the security of knowing we have enough money to buy the have-to-have stuff and we really like the freedom of knowing we have some money that can buy us the fun-to-have stuff.

But if you are super-rich, that equation can get warped. If you have so much money that buying stuff –both necessary and superfluous – gets boring, God help you. If you feel the same sense of meh from purchasing you’re fourth yacht as I do after the luster of my latest smartphone wears off, well then, the very idea of money has really been alter for you, my friend.

And if that’s the case, then there are really only two things you can do: give it all away and live a life of blissful poverty, or, vastly more likely, start treating your money like it’s the narrative thread of a James Bond movie.

Move it around under cover of darkness; give it a phony identity; squirrel it away safe from the prying eyes of THE AUTHORITIES. Such sport certainly helps differentiate the super-rich from the rest of us:

Co-worker to me on a Monday morning:  “Hey. How was the weekend?”

Me: “Good. It was my son’s birthday and I took him to a baseball game and we had a nice party with all his friends.”

Super-rich guy #1, stroking the head of an albino cheetah while sitting atop a $75,000 chair made from unicorn bones on a Monday morning:

“Greetings Osgood. How was the weekend?”

Super-rich guy #2, sipping a $16,000 snifter of scotch, crafted by blind Gregorian monks in 1902:

“Top shelf, Niles. My chief henchmen Rawlings and I flew in an unmarked Lear Jet to the Caymans and deposited roughly $28 million in non-sequential bills into six different fake import companies titled under my nephew’s authorship. Afterwards we harpooned the last known Caribbean Monk Porpoise from my experimental hovercraft. Jolly good time!”

Donald Trump, Silvio Burlesconi, Sepp Blatter, Prince Bandar, Jay Z, whoever. After you reach a certain threshold – and I have no idea what that threshold is, $100 million, $250 million, $1 billion, more? – the whole relationship with commerce changes. Money isn’t legal tender for all debts public and private. Money is an almost living entity that much be nurtured and kept safe. It’s like a shark that has to be kept moving or it will sink and die.

And the millions of pages of leaked documents within the Panama Papers? Those were simply little snapshots into the world of the super-rich and they showed once again how different that world is from ours.