THE AFTERMATH : The Agonizing Whine Down

NEW YORK —  At first glance, I thought the O.J. Simpson double-murder case was so absolutely America that it would say as much about our society right now as anything else we might see. The case, and the sophisticated to cockeyed to sleazy responses it inspired, had the tragic absurdity of a remarkably surreal blues. It was also an unpredictably improvised and dramatic example of what the Pope just called “the extraordinary human epic that is the United States of America.” That was so true of this event writ so technologically large by our media that those cry babies who now say that they were involved in the civil rights movement but feel betrayed by the acquittal must have plucked their eyes out like Oedipus at least 16 months ago.

Those of us who can recall quite easily how it used to be in this country, back when serious things were handled by a club of white guys seated at the big table in dark suits and dark ties--back in that very same civil-rights era of 30 years ago--could not have missed the fact that this case allowed us to recognize how we live now. Americana was there on parade, in every skin tone, from nearly every religious background, in almost every adult height and weight, displaying all manner of expertise, as well as incompetence and lying and pomposity and rabble-rousing and charming vitality. We heard the American voice in so many registers and using so many different kinds of diction, sounding itself in so many accents, spinning out its sentences with extraordinary eloquence or dropping to many levels below that charismatic handling of the national tongue. That’s right: These days, both sexes and an astonishing cross-section of this country’s ethnic resources are right in the middle of major events as significant players. Our country has gone past that time when all we used to be able to wonder was what the white boys would do with the world. Now our national humanity, shining or spattered or both, is at the big table.

But there is always a weird set of propositions that attend the idea of freedom in this society, and we inevitably have to look upon things with the sense of tragic optimism that, intellectually and spiritually, undergirds the nature of our democracy. As Americans, it is our quite serious duty to accept the hard and human facts of the matter. We have to work toward fairness while knowing that there will always be those who have no more pressing intention than to hustle us by distorting our ideals in the direction of dirty doings. We have to be vigilant. Folly, corruption and mediocrity are central to the human story, and they play from the bottom of the deck in this nation any way they can. So our democratic duty means that we have to work for the best and be ready for the worst. Human beings make it that way.

Because so few people understand the demands of tragic optimism, we are now in the middle of a hysterical set of reactions to the verdicts in the Simpson case. We observe all sorts of white Americans whipping up a deafening whine in which the apocalyptic is their favorite key. The Negroes let them down. They were appalled by the darkies dancing and cheering, from the college campus to the street corner. It was disgusting to see all the things that money can do in our legal system. Some have even burst into tears or croaked in smug self-pity that they can no longer have faith in the courts.

This kind of weak-kneed bitching is exactly what Negroes had to avoid in order to address the prejudicial inclinations of this society from slavery forward. Had black Americans chosen to lie down and whine themselves to sleep after the Dred Scott decision, or after Reconstruction was rolled back, or after Plessy vs. Ferguson, or after a dauntingly long list of cases in which judicial misconduct strutted to beat the band, the heroic expansion of democracy in this nation would have been lessened by far. It was, in fact, because heroic Negroes, decade after decade, chose to do more than sit on their duffs complaining that our nation is ready for the splendid array of Americana that made itself felt in Judge Lance A. Ito’s courtroom and in the endless round table of media analysis and discussion.

If injustice is what we actually witnessed in the Simpson case, then the job of those who are truly disturbed is to lessen the possibility of its recurring in this very manner. We might have to swallow the slimy pill of a dirty and ironic fact, which is that equality has a bright side and a dark side. The dark side is that one who is wealthy might not actually have equality unless he or she can get the same unfair privileges as those who are white and Christian. Beyond that, ranting about being totally appalled should be set aside in favor of recognizing what the law actually means by “reasonable doubt,” which is what the Simpson defense team was able to raise because of unarguable police hanky-panky and the way the prosecution compromised itself by bedding down in the sewer with Mark Fuhrman. They might also have to face the fact that Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., at his very best, was so exquisite that he might well have gotten an acquittal out of an all-white West Los Angeles jury, so many appear to believe would have been more bent on real and reasoned justice than a bunch of emotion-driven Negroes too easily intoxicated by what the sneering believe was no more than the fanned smoke of racial solidarity.

But if people want to recollect something to equal everything else they are so appalled by, I would suggest that they think about the observation one lawyer made about the seething denunciation of Cochran by Fred Goldman at a press conference. The lawyer said, quite rightly, that if a black person had come out of that courtroom and attacked one of the white lawyers on the prosecution team with that degree of unbanked venom, the media would have gone buck wild about the kind of irresponsibility that sparks race riots. Instead, commentator after commentator went on about how easy it was to understand Goldman’s feeling of loss, pain and frustration. Demagoguery fed by the most anguished grief still has the same spiritual flatulence. Negroes have to think about such contradictions when they see the silver-tongued Cochran festooned by bodyguards Louis Farrakhan supplies. That combination of lawyering genius and imbecilic association with some of the worst symbols of racist Negro lunacy is truly all-American.

If people want to face something equally rough, they need to think about what a clean-cut, good-looking, unflappable and witty racist like Fuhrman proves. He makes it clear, just like the luminous goons of the Nation of Islam, that race hatred doesn’t always come in a dirty package--a sweating, blubbery, inarticulate, tobacco-spitting redneck with his hand digging down in the back of his pants, on one side, or a ragged, stinking and homeless-looking Negro with blood on his eye, on the other. Trouble, like the confidence man, comes in all styles and appearances. After all, isn’t that what Nicole Brown Simpson found out, long before she and Ronald L. Goldman lay butchered in their own blood on Bundy Drive?*

* Changing the Jury System? Page M6.