This is a preview episode of The Muckrake Podcast's Patreon show that happens every Friday. To unlock the full show and a host of other great things, visit http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the death of OJ Simpson and what his place was in our culture. They shift to the Supreme Court of Arizona's ruling that allows an 1864 law on abortion to remain on the books before dissecting whether or not we've already witnessed the death of rock 'n roll.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Great Podcast.
I'm Judy at Sexton.
I've struggled with a can.
Nick, sometimes you gotta get the, the, the, the pop top ready.
Cause if you don't, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta fight it.
You know what I mean?
And that's what happened today.
What's that, you know, back in the day when that pop, that thing would come off of the can?
Oh yeah, the old-school poppin' top.
What's it called?
What was that thing, a tab?
A pop top.
A pop top?
See, people, I think, said that to me.
This phrase, pop top, doesn't mean anything to me.
I've never heard this before.
Yeah, back in the day, you would pop it and it would come completely off.
Anyway, it's watching war games when he was able to make a phone call by taking the tab of that off and then putting it near the payphone and then it suddenly works.
That's as old school as it gets.
Yes.
So I think I want to call the tab, but pop top, whatever, but weekend or sometimes.
Hey, hey, everybody.
I barely got this can open.
Hey, welcome to the weekender again.
I'm J.J.
Sexton.
I'm here at Nick Osman.
A reminder, if you are listening to free preview, go over to patreon.com slash my Craig podcast.
Support the show.
Listen, the whole show.
We have a humdinger of a thing.
Listen.
We got to talk about what's going on in Arizona, which is absolute madness.
We got to talk about cultures of charity and quote-unquote resilience in this country.
Nick and I have been planning on having a big conversation about rock and roll and its place in American culture for a while.
We're going to talk about that today.
But before we do, Nick, O.J.
Simpson died today, 76, from complications with cancer.
Of course, O.J.
Simpson is most well known as murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a guy named Ron Goldman.
I heard he played some football, too, at some point or another.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
You cannot gloss over his very important role as Nordberg.
Absolutely.
The Naked Gun series was absolutely vital for me growing up.
It was very, very important to me, but also this is an evil motherfucker.
This was one of those things, when it popped up in the newsfeed And by the way, we're not going to just talk about this, like, can you believe someone died?
Like OJ Simpson is like a major figure in American political and cultural history that we have to talk about because of many different things because of what we do on the McCrae Podcast.
Nick, this one, it shocked me that I gasped when I heard this.
But like this, this is one of the most famous and infamous people in modern American history.
Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't unaware that he was sick.
So I suppose if you did know that it maybe wasn't as much of a surprise, but certainly very young for, you know, for all intents and purposes.
And yeah, I mean, I think we all remember where we were when we first noticed he was on the run in his Bronco being driven around.
And so it was definitely one of those seminal 90s.
Well, actually seminal moments probably in the history of the country, would you say?
Yeah, I mean, that moment, and of course it happened, and I have to imagine, Nick, that you and I were both watching the NBA Finals at the time.
I was plopped down in front of my grandparents television watching the finals.
And, you know, this was a story that now looking back on, of course, it was a touchstone at the at the moment.
It feels to me, and I know this is my job, and I don't just mean like what I do on the Montclair podcast.
One of my jobs when I write books and when I think about things is I find touchstones that have larger societal and historical and cultural meanings.
That entire situation, both him murdering his ex-wife and this person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chase, how America dealt with it, what happened over the course of his trial, what it is that it told us about America and power and wealth and the justice system, all this stuff is absolutely essential to look at now in the age of Trump and also all of the crises that we're dealing with.
I mean, absolutely the idea.
Well, here's the thing.
If you don't believe that he murdered his ex-wife and her boyfriend, then this will be a rough podcast for you.
I think.
Why?
Because he did.
Right.
So if you don't, you want to, you know, just go with the, what, you know, the verdict was and how they presented the defense.
Like this is going to be tough, but I don't think most people believe that.
And so, but it does sort of, it's the harbinger of, you know, people not wanting to take responsibility.
obfuscating what the reality was changing reality denying denying denying enough money and you get away with these things all those things are you know that we see with Trump right now what he's trying to do with his lawsuits yes are all you know on display in in perfect form with with his trial and defending him for murder yeah well there's a lot of aspects to this of Of course, it showed a divide in America between class and race.
And, you know, there's plenty to talk about there.
I don't think we're the podcast that needs to talk about the racial, cultural sort of components of this, outside the fact that it was one of the moments, you know, where America sort of looked around.
They were like, Wow, our legal system, our law enforcement system, is so racist that it's not so far outside of the realm of possibility that they might actually frame a black man for doing this.
But on top of it, Nick, we turned this entire tragic situation, and I was thinking about this today, after the announcement was made that he died,
All I could think about, Nick, was how much Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the two victims of this horrific crime, and it wasn't just sort of like a small sort of, you know, obviously killing isn't a small crime, this was a savage, savage murder.
These two people were completely forgotten in this entire situation.
And what did America do with it?
The same thing that America does with all grisly things in the age of neoliberalism.
We turned it into entertainment.
We turned the entire farce of it, the disgustingness of it, like we turned this into something to consume, a product.
And I think any sort of Honest accounting of what happened then and what's happening now has to start with looking in a mirror and realizing how much capitalism has made us take for granted people's lives and how much we've trivialized what goes on in the world.
Because I'll tell you, I was the type of person who watched a lot of the coverage of this trial and a lot of the updates of it, and like a lot of people, I consumed a lot of popular culture that talked about this stuff.
And what did it do?
It trivialized two people who were cut down way, way too early in an awful, awful attack.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we hung on every second of this televised trial.
I know we'd race home after work to try and catch it.
And then also, you know, the punditry who were analyzing every day of the trial what was going on.
I think it became, it was fairly early on in the process where Everyone sort of wanted to coalesce around the notion that he did do it, right?
There's a lot of this really damning evidence had come out pretty quickly.
So this was more of like, are they going to get away with it?
Like the morbid curiosity of watching this, how is Johnny Cochran going to figure out how to spin this and whatever?
What are the mistakes?
And by the way, that was the other thing that Monday morning quarterbacking of the lawyers was also A relatively new thing.
I mean, Watergate was probably something similar to that to some degree, but it popped up a whole new genre of talking head.
You know, former lawyers and that type who could now offer their insights into whether they were doing a good job or not.
And that's persisted even to this day.
Nancy Grace, one of the most reprehensible popular culture figures that we've had over the last few years.
An absolute clown who used human tragedy and basically through sheer, you know, capitalist alchemy turned it into entertainment.
And it didn't matter that people were dying or disappearing or people were suffering or that she was accusing innocent people of doing things.
What happened and in court TV, of course, is like a really important thing because and spoiler, we're going to talk about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 later when we're talking about rock and roll, we'll get to that.
But basically what happened was that all Things entertainment-wise became segmented and everything became an open territory for being capitalized on and being ground down and turned into a product.
In this case, and by the way, we haven't even gotten into the fact that OJ Simpson was very much a proto-Donald Trump figure.
We'll get to that in just a second, but this entire thing is Actually, very symptomatic of what has gone wrong in this country and what capitalism has done, which is it goes ahead and it takes important things that matter to people like, I don't know, your life and dignity as a human being and turned it into a product.
And I can't help but think of Jay Leno, The Tonight Show, with their dancing Eidos.
How funny it was to, you know, talk about the judge in this and, like, turn it into a thing.
Have a bunch of talking heads who basically act as parasites, who are reacting to something very awful and tragic that has happened, but again, not treating it with the respect it deserves, but going ahead and turning it into entertainment.
I have a confession to make.
Is this the part of the show?
I can't wait.
Okay.
So, you know, it's not as bad as like, remember in Almost Famous when they think that they're going down on the plane and then Jimmy Fallon, you know, he confesses that he hit somebody in a car, never found out.
So, it reminds me, not only because I had scheduled an appointment for a doctor's appointment, but I said, the only time I'm going to get is if you can guarantee I'm out of there by this time, because I have to get home to see the verdict read on TV.
Because it was in the middle of the day, right?
It was must-watch TV!
Which, by the way, totally underscores, and I don't think that you're alone in that.
Well, okay, but the confession hasn't come out yet.
So I really was probably a jerk about it.
I'm like, I won't go there if you're not gonna give me like a nine o'clock slot, so I'm guaranteed to be out.
Anyway, they barely get me out on time.
I am racing home.
I'm like looking at the clock.
I realize it's like gonna be close.
I'm at a stoplight.
The car next to me gets hit from behind by another car.
Must have just like didn't see the red light, whatever.
I'm glad you feel safe enough to talk about that on this podcast.
their neck whatever but at least they were ambulatory and i left and i went home and i got to watch that thing because i wasn't and by the way and i'm i'm glad that you feel safe enough to talk about that on this podcast it probably happened because other people were probably trying to get home to watch the same thing interesting yeah and I mean, I did make sure that she was like, you know, can move, but I normally wouldn't have gotten out of my car.
I should have helped.
I should have done something, and I literally left and went home.
I think when we look back at the 1990s, particularly this specific part, I think now in 2024, and by the way, Nick, what do we do on this show?
We are talking constantly about this existential threat, right?
That has gone on.
This is the equivalent right now of being at a point where we're talking about like lung cancer after an entire life of smoking.
You know what I mean?
Like this stuff, like in the 90s, it didn't seem so important.
Right?
Because we had like a America was growing and everybody was just like, I don't know if it's that big of a deal.
I think it was for a lot of people.
But I think monoculture, the culture writ large, was like, Oh, yeah, absolutely.
This is a great time where we don't have to worry about these types of things.
I think that things have changed.
But these moments are times to look back.
And by the way, like I've done my fair share of, you know, sort of Like a 12-step type of thing?
You have to take a moral inventory sometimes.
You have to look back at this and you have to say, wow, my priorities were not great.
You know what I mean?
And as a result, I think that this entire thing is a good opportunity to sort of look back through the prism of the present and start to recognize, like, This is how you end up where we're at.
For sure.
We can't limit it to the 90s, though, because we've had these these kind of trials and these kind of murders.
It's got to have sex.
It had murder.
We love it.
No, you know, love it.
Everything was it checked all the boxes for it, for the morbid curiosity that our civilization or our society has.
And so that's why I have to imagine.
I mean, in the also the background of it, aside from the race, was how does he think he's going to get away with this?
And in fact, I like what you said about how we forgot about Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman because we didn't think about them as victims or as real people who were murdered.
We were kind of, I think, more focused on how is the guy going to get away with it, right?
And that's really what I think was got lost in the whole thing, which is too bad.
Well, I mean, for lack of a better way to put it, and as I'm saying this, I want to remind people of what it's like to turn on cable news and hear the walls are closing in on Trump and, oh, we heard from this person and this person and this person.
Real life becomes a television show, right?
That's what it does, is all of a sudden, because it's turned into a product, it's pushed away from us.
Speaking of Trump, though, I mean, I think what OJ Simpson, and by the way, completely reviled person, right?
But was still like being invited to like celebrity golf tournaments.
He was still doing all this stuff, even though like he was found in 1997 liable for the deaths.
Later on, of course, he went to prison because of other dealings.
It turns out that this guy who killed these people wasn't a great person and had problems.
But, you know, like when it comes to Trump, Nick, he was a powerful man, a powerful and wealthy man who had a long history of abusing Nicole Brown Simpson.
Like, like, on the record, police showing up, dealing with this stuff.
He wasn't held accountable.
Eventually, he did stuff that put him in, you know, into the spotlight where they couldn't ignore it anymore.
He had to be taken into court.
Never apologized for any of it.
He was like one of the people who sort of made it apparent that as long as you don't apologize or take accountability for it, people really can't do that very much to you, particularly as a wealthy man.
You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and subscribe for lots more additional content, including a Discord server and live shows.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
