Volume 5, Issue 15: Remember When

"It's the lowest form of conversation."

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Every generation has collective moments when time stops, when something so momentous happens that it’s obvious in the moment you’ll be able to recall every specific detail about it for the rest of your life. We all have these stories: Where we were, what we doing, how we reacted when the world went from being one way to suddenly, violently jolting into an entirely different place all together—a place from which we’ll never return. The Kennedy assassination is the canonical example for my parents’ generation; my mom always talks about how my grandmother was initially angry Walter Cronkite interrupted “As the World Turns,” her favorite soap opera. (Our family watched “As the World Turns” well into my adulthood; Holden and Lily, forever!) Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, the Bay of Pigs, these moments populate the entirety of American history.

I have five of these in my life. And two of them revolve around O.J. Simpson.

It is impossible to explain to someone who was not there just how all-encompassing the O.J. Simpson saga was.

In the wake of Simpson’s death this week from cancer, which I wrote about for New York, much has been made of the trial itself, for good reason; rarely has America’s insanity been portrayed in broad daylight as plainly as it was for those few months. But when I think back about the O.J. Simpson saga, I still hark back to the very beginning, when it became clear that Simpson was in fact a suspect in his ex-wife’s murder. The most shocking moment was the first one, the idea that O.J. Simpson, O.J. Simpson, could be a murderer. O.J.? That O.J.? The smiling guy on NBC? The guy from all the commercials? Nordberg? This guy?

I do not blame young people for reading back about all this and finding us all a bit deranged. It all must seem like such a luxury to them, for us to have the months on end to dedicate to the arrest and trial of a frivolous celebrity, rather than trying to keep our head above water during multiple wars, economic calamity, global pandemics, violent insurrections, end-stage capitalism and existential threats to American democracy itself. You guys all lost your minds about a football player? Shoot: Must be nice.

There is a lot of validity to this observation: It is incredibly odd to have two of your five holy-shit historical moments—the Bronco chase, and the trial verdict—revolve arond something that didn’t end up mattering at all. The other three—watching the Challenger explosion with my fifth grade class, September 11, 2001, and March 11, 2020—involved world-changing events, the ramifications of which would be felt for the rest of the lives of everyone who lived through them. (I don’t think Election Nights, the two most breathtaking of which were 2008 and 2016, for exact opposite reasons, count in this calculation; those are scheduled events everyone knew would be axis-shifting, ones we all had months to prepare for. These sort of generation-altering moments require some inherent unexpectedness to them.) As ahistorical, blinkered and TikTok-y as the younger generation can sometimes be at this moment, you certainly can’t blame them for rolling their eyes when we try to explain why the Simpson story was such a big deal at the time. They’ve grown up with far more horrors surrounding them, on a daily basis, than we in Generation X ever did.

But that we thought it was the biggest story we’d ever live through, I’d argue, is a positive sign for society at the time rather than a negative one. For all the ugliness of the Simpson case, for all that it dredged up about American attitudes about celebrity, domestic violence and race—as brilliantly displayed in the still-a-masterpiece Oscar-winning ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America, which you can (and should) watch (or re-watch) right now—it was ultimately the sort of sideshow a generally healthy society can invest itself in because the world is otherwise not on fire everywhere. Obviously, not everybody thrived in the ‘90s, and there were widespread miseries and then-unexamined systemic inequalities that we all understand better today than we did then. There are many, many things we’d handle differently now. But it was also a time of peace, and economic stability, and fascinating (if not necessarily lasting) cultural trends that we haven’t experienced since. When people say “must be nice” to have lived around this time period, it is often said with disdain, like somehow we should all feel guilty for having briefly believed we weren’t all doomed. But the ‘90s—and having the mental and cultural space to believe frivolous stories were more momentous than they would turn out to be—shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of. Shouldn’t we sort of all aspire to that sort of thing? Shouldn’t that be the goal?

One of the many great aspects to Chuck Klosterman’s fantastic book “The Nineties”—I think it’s his best book, and I’ve read them all—is how he attempts to address the ‘90s as they were actually experienced rather than how we look back at them now. How, for example, could people who had dedicated their lives to justice for the oppressed, who had fought for women’s rights for decades, have all not only defended a President who had a deeply inappropriate relationship with an intern, but actually openly mock, slander and verbally assault that intern every night on television? Klosterman attempts to explain how by studiously using the logic of the moment, rather than tsk-tsking after years of distance, reflection and cultural change. He doesn’t defend the ‘90s, or lambast them: He just writes about how they were experienced at the time, what everyone was thinking was as they were thinking it. Much of this thinking turned out to be flawed and oppressive in its own right, which is worthy of retroactive criticism but is also, of course, simply indicative of how human beings are: We thought a lot of stupid things in the ‘90s because people have always thought a lot of stupid things and always will. When we look back at our current decade years from now, we will find so many things to criticize and mock about what we all thought to be true and important, because we’re all doing a postgame show rather than living the moment as it happened. Saying there was something inherently wrong with paying so much attention to the Simpson story at the time because of all the horrors that were coming in the decades to come is like criticizing a manager afterwards for putting a hitter in the lineup who went 0-for-4 against a pitcher they traditionally hit well against: Sure, easy for you to say now. Let’s see how you look in 20 years, pal.

And, as Klosterman noted in an interview I did with him for GQ after the release of that book, living during a time period in which you did not feel as if you needed to live every second as if the world was about to end was also an invitation to aspire toward self-actualization and self-understanding; it, in his words, let you work on yourself. This sounds selfish now, but one must remember, this was on the heels of the ‘80s, a decade in which the only goal was to amass as much fortune as possible, consume everything in sight and stand on the necks of anyone who dared stand in your way. As he put it in the interview:

It was a time when you could kind of just kind of drop out, and be yourself, and work on your own life, or whatever. After the 1980s, where there was this idea that you deserve to be rewarded for really going for the jugular all the time, just getting what you can was seen as admirable. There was a sense in the ’90s that it was OK just to have your concern to be, “How is my life is in this apartment in which I rent?” Or maybe even smaller—what life is like inside of my mind as I sit in this chair in this apartment that I rent.

There is now a kind of pejorative belief that thinking about yourself, and the meaning of your own life is almost some sort of selfish act—that it’s maybe an extension of privilege, somehow. That the fact that you’re thinking about your own life proves that you’re not really concerned about people whose lives are worse. But not only do I not believe that, I don’t think it would necessarily be harmful even if it was partially true. This is our one chance to be alive. If you’re not somewhat interested in your own life, then what is important? If your life is meaningless, why would someone else’s matter, then?

Again: I understand why young people today, who do not know what it is like not to feel constantly surrounded by calamity, would find it absurd that the biggest story for multiple years would be the arrest and trial of a (it must be said, very cheesy) celebrity. But you really should have been there. Seriously, you really should have: It was a lot easier time to live than now. And it if was easier then, it could be easier again.

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The irony, as Klosterman also points out in the interview, is that the experience of actually living through that time, as it happened, didn’t feel particularly calming at all. It only feels that way now, now that we know what was about to come. “When I look back at the time, though, I am forced to accept that I believed I was miserable. I certainly expressed ideas that you would hear from a miserable person,” he told me. “But now it seems like if I could take a vacation to any time in my life for two weeks, I would like to go back to April 1994.” I suspect this is a universal human condition. In 20 years, young people who, in some ways justifiably see this world as stacked against them, will almost certainly look back at these days of their youth as the most pleasurable and free of their lives. As we middle-aged people now know, what lies ahead of them are years of stress, responsibility, regret, fears of insignificance, unrealized dreams and back pain. (“If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” said Randall “Pink” Floyd in Dazed and Confused, a movie that had this sensation down cold. Melissa Maerz’s oral history of that movie is also one of the best ‘90s chronicles you’ll read.) To quote someone I try not to quote much anymore, “Nostalgia is denial of the painful present. It’s the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in, a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present. That’s what the present is. It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.” We always think things were better in the past because the past is not right now. Right now always feels a little worse.

But I think right now may actually be a little worse. Which is why while, sure, it’s a little embarrassing that two of the most formidable historic memories I have in my life involve a celebrity I never met, wasn’t particularly invested in the career of and who was a truly horrible human being, I think it’s OK to look back at a time when O.J. Simpson was the center of every cultural conversation with some justified nostalgia as well. In college, when we at the Daily Illini covered the O.J. Simpson story, we thought we were covering the biggest story of our lifetimes. I actually remember comparing notes with Roger Ebert, who was my mentor at the time, about how he had been working on the night desk the day Kennedy was assassinated, just like I had been the night O.J. was acquitted. Each of us found the assignments comparable and of similar import, which, in retrospect, is obviously incorrect. But it’s OK that we thought that. We wouldn’t have thought back then that if the world would have been on fire as it is now. Which means it wasn’t as on fire then. Which means it can maybe this current fire can be put out—or at least quelled. It means it doesn’t always have to be like this. Because at one point, a point many of us can still remember quite vividly, it wasn’t. I swear: It really wasn’t.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. I Did the O.J. Simpson Obit for New York, New York. I was honored they asked me to do this.

2. It Is Impossible Not to Root For These Knicks, New York. Let’s goooooooooooo

3. The MLB Five Fascinations, MLB.com. This week, featuring: Jackson (and Matt) Holliday, Elly de la Cruz, Salvador Perez, Tyler O’Neill and, sigh, the Cubs.

4. Which Slow-Starting Teams Are in Trouble? MLB.com. Looking at you, Twins.

5. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. I’m glad to be a part of the big revamp of these this year, it’ll be fun.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Monkey Man,” “The Beast” and “Girls State.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are feeling more optimistic than most.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, Tony Waller and I previewed G-Day.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Arizona’s Split Reality,” Olivia Nuzzi, New York. When the inevitable anthology of great Olivia Nuzzi pieces is compiled into book form, I will be the first person to pre-order that monster. She’s incredible, every time. I love the bit where she tries to get Lake to go off the record and realizes that there might not be a real person left in there anymore.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Take Me Out,” Franz Ferdinand. This song once made me and Aileen Gallagher dance around a very small Queens apartment together.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Shoutout to our NCAA Pool Winners!

Men’s:

Women’s:

I need SAT and RSpuhler to contact me so you can collect your prizes. (If you really want them!)

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will