When I think of O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday, April 10 of prostate cancer at age 76 in Las Vegas, I think of the short story '“Appointment in Samarra,” often retold in novels. The protagonist encounters the figure of Death, and to elude the dreaded specter, runs off to Samarra, only to find Death waiting there at the place where they were destined to meet. You cannot escape fate — or the consequences of your actions, no matter what else you do in life. Such is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of karma.
On Oct. 3, 1995, in one of the many trials that are always dubbed “the trial of the century,” Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, a woman he often abused; and Ron Goldman, who has been described invariably as her friend and the acquaintance who was returning the sunglasses she left in the restaurant where he worked and was simply, horrifically, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thirteen years later to the day, Simpson was convicted on armed robbery and kidnapping charges related to his attempt to steal trophies and other emblems of his identity whose sale was partly the result of the successful suit the Simpson and Goldman families had brought against him. (He served nine years in prison.)
For many, Simpson was and is a man who got away with murder. For many others in the Black community, his acquittal — brilliantly engineered by a “?Dream Team” of lawyers led by Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz and the man who today is known as Kim Kardashian’s father and who back then was Robert Kardashian — represented the small triumph of an oppressed people finally sticking to the Man. Never mind that two wrongs don’t make a right or that Simpson was a Black-identified man in the way that Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Tiger Woods are Black-identified. In other words, not very.
For feminists, the Simpson verdict was a reminder that race trumps gender, that a man has the power to engage in domestic violence and get away with it. But for still others, Simpson is simply “the Juice,” one of the greatest running backs of all time, whose talent and engaging, racially neutral persona led to a career as a successful pitchman (Hertz) and second banana in hit films (“Towering Inferno,” “The Naked Gun” series). When I think of Simpson, too, I think of Nordberg, the sidekick he played to Leslie Nielsen’s hapless detective, Frank Drebin, in “The Naked Gun” series of film comedies, going under cover in a mariachi band in one and helping to foil a plot in another to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II, who’s depicted at a baseball game, passing along hotdogs in her white gloves like any baseball fan would, of course
Can you separate a person’s good work from his evil actions? Some can. Others see a person in his totality for better or worse. Perhaps the ego that drove Simpson’s success also drove his murderous rage. But he was also described as dying surrounded by his children and grandchildren. Did they come to think of the murderer of their mother and grandmother, as Simpson did, as someone who was still out there, instead of a face in a not-too-distant mirror? Or did they “know without knowing,” as biographer Peter Green once described Alexander the Great’s response to his mother, Olympias, engineering the assassination of his father, Philip II of Macedon. In those pre-DNA days, your legitimacy or illegitimacy as a king hung on your mother. If she were no good, so were you. Alexander was 20, already a proven military leader, when his father died, and he inherited his parents’ dynastic, imperial ambitions.
The Simpson children — daughter Sydney and son Justin — were only 9 and 6 respectively when their mother was murdered. After his acquittal, Simpson was awarded custody of the kids. Perhaps almost any parent is better than no parent. Or perhaps as Erich Maria Remarque notes in his novel “Arch of Triumph,” it’s amazing what people can get used to. We see what we want to see, because to see anything else calls into question our judgment, our very identity. What’s more palatable — to believe your surviving parent killed the other or that the murderer has to date not been found? Or what could be more noble, to know your father killed your mother and to love him anyway.
Which brings us back to Samarra and the end to which we all tend. O.J. Simpson went to prison for a crime he would not have committed had he not been found civilly liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
There is irony in that. There is poetic justice in that. There is even real justice in that.
For many, it will never be enough.