By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS
Men and women were weeping, holding each other in the courtroom tonight as the verdicts were read aloud on OJ and his cohort. The courtroom rang with the woman reader’s voice, clipped, shrill even:
both men
Guilty
Guilty
Guilty
Guilty
over and over, Guilty
Weirdly, truly weirdly, this Guilty verdict comes 13 years to the exact date of OJ’s acquittal on murdering two souls, Ron Goldman, and Nicole Brown Simpson.
Who else will be weeping tonight? Not likely OJ, who appears to still be the last century’s major example of public character disorder, but the Goldmans, Ron’s family… and no doubt the Browns, Nicole’s family… they will be weeping for many different reasons. It’s a dark, not a bright Kismet.
Yet it may be some sliver of victory for them, given that OJ will remain, as of this moment, in custody until sentencing… and the sentence, even at minimum will leave OJ in his late 70s when he might be released. If the judge chooses however, the sentence can be for Life. That too may bring what is called ‘cold comfort’ to the Brown and Goldman families.
The crimes this time around were not only gross theft. The crimes are kidnapping, armed robbery. All of it, thuggery.
But there has been another crime, one for which there is no court nor recompense other than that of public opinion; Thirteen years ago, OJ held himself out as an innocent black man persecuted, and has insisted ever since, that racial divides, rather than his own deeds, ought be the sole judging point of same oppressed OJ.
It’s one thing if his criminal charges from long ago, and his being brought to trial, were in fact racially motivated. That would be wrong.
But, many might say it is quite another to be accused and brought to trial because there is strong reason to suspect the suspect…. of an irreversible and heinous crime … repeatedly stabbing two unarmed people to death on the sidewalk….
Then, it’s the data, not the skin, that raises the essential questions to probe and determine.
The folktale Bluebeard– is one of the original stories about a criminal hiding behind “You don’t trust/like me/ give me a fair shake because I am simply different… my beard, you see, through no fault of my own, is an eerie blue color–
Yet in the Bluebeard tale, it is not the color of his beard, but rather his deeds of murdering those who will not submit to him, and his subsequent hiding of his murderous rages behind his public preening and gloating…
all these lead him, not to being convicted, but cut down into bloody pieces on the parapets by those who loved the souls he murdered….
One could say, today OJ was forced to the parapets. And what else? In the tale, those who’d been to Bluebeard’s castle and seen its finery and dined there, has long defended him when he was first charged with the mysterious kidnapping and disappearance of women…
but, they were hard pressed to continue their defending once the room where Bluebeard stored the macabre remains of his crimes was finally opened… and they saw that Bluebeard’s crimes formed a pattern of “Mine mine all mine,” followed by rabid obsession to force his mad will on others, thence followed by his “taking by force the gifts not yet given.”
It may be a similar realization for some of the people in our land tonight. Reluctantly, even.
In folklore and sagas, as in reality, there is often a ‘but for’ in the story…. that is, that the gifts of the anti-hero, could have, should have been saved to gold instead of mayhem.
So at the end of Bluebeard story as told in our family, there is no rejoicing. Just somber thought.
About how it could have been for a man who began as unusual and gifted, but for…
But for…
http://themoderatevoice.com/society/law-legal-matters/legal-matters/23196/oj-simpson-and-bluebeard-a-lost-story/Copyright: Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 2008 "Fair Use" encouraged.
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