OJ Simpson hid behind the lame excuse that Nicole had come to the door with a knife.
(Image by CJS*64 A man with a camera) Details DMCA
This is a book review of Mike Gilbert's book "Confessions: How I helped OJ Get Away with Murder." It is a confession by OJ's agent and confidant that perhaps reveals more about OJ than was intended. Gilbert got OJ to confess that he had done it, but OJ hid behind the lame excuse that Nicole had come to the door with a knife ..
In the end it must be said that the OJ Simpson double murder trial was lost by the racism implicit in, and implicated from, deep within the dark subtext of American society. Moreover, the trial proved that the pathology inherent in the empty, plastic Simpson marriage, as well as the injustice inherent in OJ's acquittal for double murder, are both embarrassing models of a thoroughly bankrupt post-modern American society.
On the one hand, Prosecutor, Marcia Clark, the ultimate representative of the white feminist domestic violence brigade, confidently rolled the dice during the voir dire, licking her chops as she picked as many black women for the jury as the law would allow. She would discover only too late that the "Dream Team" had outsmarted her, simply by doing their job on the attitudes of black women, and not objecting to Clark's selections. They knew well before Clark did that she had set a trap for herself and that her dice would come up craps, and that her "feminist domestic violence dog" would not hunt.
Clark apparently did not recognize nor take into account the fact that black women had a separate agenda of their own, in which they played the racist game with as much finesse as any one else in American society, and surely much better than Clark could ever have imagined. While Clark mistakenly thought they were "hooked" on the American white women's feminist agenda of domestic violence. They were not. In fact black women were simply biding their time, "laying in wait" for an opportunity to correct the injustice done to Rodney King.
That, ladies and gentlemen is the long and short of the injustice of the OJ Simpson double murder trial. History will record too that black women got a full measure of revenge by acquitting the thoroughly guilty double murderer, OJ Simpson. And just as whites pretended that those six white cops caught on camera beating the hell out of Rodney King were absolutely 100% not guilty, so too did blacks pretend that OJ Simpson, was, if not absolutely 100% innocent, at least was not proven to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Both acquittals -- one in which the police were seen on international TV beating Rodney King to within an inch of his life, and then moving the trial to "Reagan country" in Simi Valley, where the outcome of the trial of six thoroughly guilty white policemen could be controlled; and the other trial, in which a black woman dominated-jury would acquit OJ of the senseless murders -- are but parallel racial universes at opposite ends of the racial polarity scale, a scale of a deep collective sickness called "American racist society."
With this book, we get yet another part of the story told by OJ's agent and confidant, Mike Gilbert. It is a story full of sadness, moral indiscretions and consequences piled atop the pathos of men and women caught up in the whirlwind of OJ's psychopathology, of mostly megalomania and "arrested development." One of those men who got caught up in the OJ whirlwind was Mike Gilbert himself.
Now, with OJ in prison serving out a 30-year sentence for a questionable robbery, a sentence that many felt he deserved for the double murders, America's racist world finally has been set upright again. White people can now exhale and breath again because the "low-life N-Word" has gotten his just due. And as always, white America's re-revenge is made to seem normal. This minuet of "pretend normality," which is really little more than a rehearsal for never having to admit that American society is a carefully package racial fraud, literally a Potemkin Village, where on the back streets lay a cesspool of racial animosities, and on front street, everything has the appearance of peace and harmony. After all we have a faux black President, don't we? This too is all part of the dance of American racial sickness.
Sadly, Gilbert's lament here is so over-shadowed by the deeper context of American racism, that the author's admission that he helped Simpson get away with double murder, is hardly worth dwelling on. He wants us to believe that the reason he lost his moral way was entirely out of blind loyalty to OJ, and that it was not about OJ's money.
However, in the U.S., one can never forget the axiom that if one says it is not about the money, then you can be confident that it is only "about the money." In this case, Gilbert's lament is betrayed by the fact that right up until OJ's last ride to the "hokey" over stolen sports memorabilia, Mike Gilbert still had both hands in the OJ "cash box."
Despite Gilbert's disingenuousness about his own guilt and culpability, I believe he nevertheless redeems himself. But he does so not by admitting that he helped OJ get away with double murder (no matter what he says, he did not!), but by emphasizing on page 147 that every time OJ's mouth moved, he is lying.
In this seemingly innocent aside, perhaps unwittingly the author has given us the skeleton key to the OJ personality. For OJ's lying, throughout his life, is no small matter. Indeed, for him it was and still is, profoundly existential. I believe that Gilbert's manuscript here proves that it was OJ's inability to be truthful to himself that proved to be the key to the double murder. For, behind the wall of lies that had become OJ's signature, lay the psychological pressures that had built up from his childhood.
As elementary Freudianism teaches us, the lies were there to protect OJ against pain, fear and traumas that he had experienced at an age when his ego was too fragile and too underdeveloped to cope unaided. Lies became the front line of OJ's psychological defense. For years they were the only armor he had. And in this sense they were not unlike the front line that later was to protect him as he ran for a Heisman Trophy at USC.
But in the real world of self-awareness, we know that there is a cruel paradox to built-in psychological defenses: unless one eventually "catches up" in his development and maturity, his defenses can outlive their usefulness and turn dramatically against him. They then become an albatross around one's neck that everyone else but the owner can see.
Arguably, even until this day, OJ Simpson's mind still exists in a state of "arrested development" -- stunted and stopped in their tracks during a period in his childhood where he was unable to cope with the pain, fear and trauma of things well beyond his control.
And thus bluster, megalomania, and macho posturing aside, it is the world's worse kept secret that OJ Simpson never quite outlived the trauma, fear and pain of having an openly gay father prancing around in his Potrero ghetto neighborhood throughout OJ youth. "Sweet Jimmy Simpson," OJ's father, was busy prancing about in frilly gay outfits, with his gay friends, constantly embarrassing the Simpson family, especially OJ's mother, and OJ himself.
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