From: marilyn
Date: December 21, 2005
Time: 06:02 PM
Second post on topic; first forwarded itself... must have a very sensitive puter. While watching the first trial, I was struck by how emotional Kim Goldberg acted. And I put the emphasis on "acted," because she stayed in a total state of angst that was just this side of a pathological seizure. That may be unkind, neither have I lost a loved one to violence. However, to stay day after day in a situation that threw you into mental collapse was in itself a subject for rational diagnosis. She could have stayed away; she could have chosen to watch it on TV; she could have chosen simply read or get recaps daily. No, I think she enjoyed the notoriety and having the cameras flash on her periodically. She pulled out all the stops, just short of passing out, IMO. My sympathy stopped when it occured to me that she was indeed seeing herself in a TV series role--the role of her life, her fifteen minutes of fame. Did she feel grief? Of course; did she play it for all it was worth? It was obvious. Like a child star who cannot make the leap into adult films, some actors cannot recover from the addictions of glaring spotlights; stardom is ephemeral; the Browns and Goldmans reveled in sudden stardom, even though it was premised on death of a family member. There are some things within the human condition that should remain in the private domain. Grief, birth, death are some of those events. Individual dignity is required in civil societies to retain the thin veneer of civility. I think Kim, her father and some of the Brown girls stepped over that line. Their pursuit of OJ and his assests illustrate that. Their desire to remain in the public eye leads me to believe they are exploiting a very unhappy situation for personal gain, not for closure of sincere grief. Perhaps they are being exploited by others who, for whatever the reason, are using the OJ phenonomena. That only goes to prove how the Bundy murders caused an unhealed rent in our social fabric. It also demonstrates that our failure to convict an innocent man still permeates the body politic and will be exploited until history itself is wiped clean of memory. That may take a thousand years... marilyn