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.

COULD YOU IMAGINE IF…?

One of my favorite phrases is: “Could you imagine if…?”

As in, “could you imagine if smartphones had never been invented?” Or: “could you imagine if Michael Jordan played in today’s NBA with the restrictions on physical play?”

 

Playing that forward, here are my two current favorite applications of that phrase:

 

1.       Could you imagine if the Republican National Convention allowed attendees to open carry firearms?

2.       Could you imagine if in addition to their regular customers, a group of black or middle-eastern men showed up to this restaurant with guns strapped to their sides?

I can. I can imagine.

I can imagine that devout First Amendment zealots like Trump and Cruz, would refuse to take the stage if hundreds or even dozens of delegates had Glocks or Smith & Wessons stuck in their Walmart reversible belts and Wrangler jeans. I could imagine The Donald and Lyin’ Ted holed up in their dressing rooms, yelling at their campaign staffs to demand a complete and total disarmament of the convention floor.

And at that Utah restaurant where guns are currently welcome…?

Come on. If a group of 20-somehting black men in ghetto chic and armed to the teeth started showing up and ordering the blue plate special, how long do you think it would take for the owners to hang a sign in the window prohibiting firearms in the establishment? A week? 10 days, tops?

And if that group included a dozen Muslim men in robes and beards and 9 mm pistols? How long then? I’m guessing there would be a sign in the window by closing time that day!

 

THE EXPENDABLES

 

Full caveat: I like Duke basketball and I think Mike Krzyzewski is a great coach and has shown class and humility his entire career.

That being said, I have a really bad taste in my mouth from his actions at the end of his team’s loss to Oregon in the NCAA Tournament.

Not, because he lectured Dillon Brooks about sportsmanship. Not totally because he lied about it, when confronted with an obvious discrepancy with the player’s account.

No, my biggest complaint is the fact that even the sainted Coach K – by his actions – showed that players are universally treated as lesser humans than coaches or athletic directors or NCAA administrators.

Follow me if you will.

There may be no person associated with sports who is more revered and loved than Coach K. He is widely considered to be not only one of the greatest coaches in history, but also considered one of the best people associated with sports.

Yet, when confronted with evidence that seemed to contradict his own words, the first course of action he took was to offer a lie at the expense of a 19-year-old’s integrity. Period.

Why? Why did he do it? I don’t think it was because he’s suddenly become a bad person, or because Mike Krzyzewski has been pulling the wool over the eyes of the sports world for decades. And I don’t think he did it because he was embarrassed at being caught red-handed.

I think he did it because despite his stellar reputation and celebrated character, Coach K threw a player under the bus, because whenever it comes down to coach vs. player, coach is always in the driver’s seat and player is always under the wheels.

Coaches own the manor and players are the help.  And who are you going to believe: the lord of the manor - a gentlemen who literally has a court named after him and is known around the world by a single letter – or some small forward from the University of Oregon who 99% of the country didn’t even know prior to the start of March Madness?

And If Coach K was ready to leave tire marks across a player’s chest, can you imagine what true bad guys like John Calipari or Rick Pitino would do? My god, they’d probably claim they told Brooks what a great game he played only to have him spit in their face and scream: “go to hell!”

Thus is the current landscape of big-time college basketball. Players are like disposable cameras: you need them to make a shot and take a shot, but once that’s done, toss em’.

 

SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY WANT TO

 

If I didn’t understand it before, this  really helped.  The clip of Samantha Bee, AKA “The one that got away from Comedy Central after John Stewart left” talking with Trump supporters finally helped me to understand what this is all about. 

No, Trump supporters aren’t supporters because of ideology or philosophy.

No, Trump supporters aren’t supporters because they believe he will make America great again.

No, Trump supporters aren’t supporters because they think he will do a great job as president.

Trump supporters ARE supporters because they want to be.

It’s finally become crystal clear to me. People are supporting Trump because he represents the best opportunity they have to say “F you” to a system that has totally left them behind.

Think about it.  If you fit the Trump supporter profile: white, relatively uneducated, lower middle to working class poor with no real hope of ever moving up, socially conservative and fearful of gays and liberated women - the two current political parties don’t work for you.

Liberals and democrats? They are too educated, socially tolerant, diverse and metropolitan to cater to Trump supporter’s fear of blacks, foreigners and independent thinking  women. And in a nation that is getting more diverse, younger and more tolerate, whites who long for the 1950’s can’t find safe harbor with this group.

Mainstream conservatives? They are too tied to that exclusive club of rich and well educated elites that only want Trump supporters at election time and would never want them as full time members. And in a nation with massive income inequality, this group will continue to move further and further away from everyone else.

But Trump? He’s so crass and so simple sounding that he panders to them better than anyone has before. He even makes arguments the same way they do – by repeating the same simple words over and over again in an increasingly loud and blustery way.

And he’s become relevant and famous in a manner that is the only path toward relevancy and fame that they could ever really see for themselves: dumb luck. He inherited a bunch of money from his dad – enough in fact to weather his many unfortunate business decisions – and became a reality TV star. For Trump supporters, that kind of stumbling into fame and fortune fits their world view because they know they are never going to become rich and famous through intelligence, talent and hard work.

Their lives are dreary and boring. They are angry at the certitude of that condition. They want to strike out at the left’s tolerance and education and the right’s wealth and privilege.

And here comes The Donald. Supporting Trump is like the teenage girl who takes up with the tattooed biker dude to piss off her parents. She knows the guy’s a loser and a waste of her time, but at least he’s a leather-clad and spiked-haired middle finger to her overbearing and oppressive mom and dad.

They cling to Trump because they want to. They go to his rallies because by doing so affords them one last chance to have a voice in a nation that would just assume vote them off the island as the weak link.

“Why are you supporting Donald Trump?” we may ask.

“Because I want to and I can,” says a truly honest supporter, “and that’s all I might have left.”

Permission to be shot

Here’s a dilemma for a concerned father.

Soon, my daughter’s 5^th grade class will participate in an active shooter drill during school.  If you haven’t heard about these very 21^st century educational extras, this provides a pretty good overview.

Now, I hate America’s gun culture with every fiber of my being. I hate the fact that we cannot address common sense gun control in our country and I hate that a putrid, violent and wholly a-moral cabal of misfits and fraidy cat racists like the NRA hold complete sway over our political leaders.

I also don’t want to do anything within a micron toward consent of that wonderfully American sentiment best described as, “well, what are ya gonna do?” regarding the prevalence of guns in our culture.

Yet, I will willfully sign the letter of consent my daughter brought home which allows her to participate in the exercise.  I don’t have to. I could say no and have her simply go read some books in the school library while her classmates are learning how to throw binders and I-pads at a would-be assailant and how to swarm the active shooter from all sides so as to lessen the odds that everyone in class gets shot.

Indeed, I could protest our brain numbing cultural which happily accepts regulations that all but place land-mines around a woman’s reproductive systems, yet practically stuffs handguns and assault rifles down our throats at every turn. But I won’t. I want my daughter to take the class and be prepared.

Thus, we have lost the battle for our soul when it comes to guns in America. We will never have sensible laws that help protect innocent people from mass shootings. We will always have gun violence and we will always live with the real possibility that your child or mine will be killed at school or in a movie theater or in a mall.

And so, we will simply shuffle along and instead of taking on the route cause, sign permission slips which lets our children learn about defensive tactics.

When it comes to guns, Americans are sheep. We let our government regulate cars, medicines, air travel, sports, X ray machines, chemicals and thousands of other things that can cause harm. We willfully, register our cars and take tests to prove we can drive them, yet no one screams that the DMV is trying to take away our Hondas and our freedoms.

Nice work everyone.

 

NOT SAYIN’, JUST SAYIN’

 

Recently, two evil men grabbed their firearms and went on shooting sprees that respectively took the lives of six and three people.  This guy killed six and this guy killed three.

The first guy killed six people and was apprehended without incident by police.

The second guy killed three people and was immediately shot dead by police.

The first guy drove around for more than four hours and shot random people at three different locations, creating a massive public safety crisis and potentially endangering dozens if not hundreds of innocent people.

The second guy went to a single location with a limited number of people and was actively engaged in specifically targeting co-workers for a total of 26 minutes.

NOT SAYIN’, JUST SAYIN’

Recently, two evil men grabbed their firearms and went on shooting sprees that respectively took the lives of six and three people.  This guy killed six and this guy killed three.

The first guy killed six people and was apprehended without incident by police.

The second guy killed three people and was immediately shot dead by police.

The first guy drove around for more than four hours and shot random people at three different locations, creating a massive public safety crisis and potentially endangering dozens if not hundreds of innocent people.

The second guy went to a single location with a limited number of people and was actively engaged in specifically targeting co-workers for a total of 26 minutes.

Here is a photo of the first guy:

 

And here is a photo of the second guy:

I’m sure that there were different circumstances involved in both crimes and that police at each scene did what their training and experience dictated.

But, I’m not sayin’, just sayin’: A white guy drives around for four hours and shoots six random people in a populous American city yet in the end, he’s taken peacefully into custody. Meanwhile, a black man is shot dead after a 26 minute rampage in a single location, targeting a specific group of victims.

Doesn’t it seem just a tad bit strange?