Labor Pains

Today's column for the Daily Banter focuses on Michigan governor Rick Snyder's fast-tracking of legislation that just turned the cradle of organized labor into a "right-to-work" state.

My take on it is personal -- and will probably draw at least a small amount of criticism from the hard-left -- while I hope being reasonable.

Here's an excerpt:

"My biggest issue when it came to the unions at KCBS was always this: workers weren’t really given a choice as to whether or not they wanted to be a part of them. I had been hired on as a 'senior producer,' a muscular-sounding title which belied the fact that the KCBS brain trust had basically just pulled it out of their asses. What they’d done, see, is label me a manager without actually giving me any of the authority of a manager — and they’d done it for no other reason than to ensure that, as a manager-in-name, I wouldn’t be obligated to join the Writers Guild of America, the union that oversaw the station’s producer corps. They likely considered the idea a stroke of inspired genius, but, as expected, the Guild saw through this bit of juvenile misdirection and filed grievance upon grievance against the station for attempting to game the system while simultaneously trying to pressure me to join up and pay them the required union dues. The station management ignored the Guild’s complaints; I threw the angry bi-weekly letters I got from it in the garbage.

Here’s what it came down to: I didn’t want to be forced into paying out part of my salary to a third-party. I had been hired by KCBS and as far as I was concerned, as shitty as it was, it was the only entity I had personally made an agreement with. I wanted the choice to not have any association whatsoever with the union.

I do, in fact, question the fairness of making workers submit, en masse, to the authority of a labor union... The counter-argument against a willingness to debate this is generally of the “well, no one’s forcing you to join, only to pay a diminished due” variety. Sorry, but that isn’t much of a salve for those who literally want nothing at all to do with the union where he or she works or is going to work. "

Read the Rest Here

DXM History Repeats: Television

Continuing with some of the best DXM pieces having to do with television, this was originally posted in late 2006, just as the controversy over O.J. Simpson's pseudo-confessional book If I Did It was reaching a boiling point. Obviously, Simpson is now in prison, his saga finally ending in a guilty verdict that followed a bizarre misadventure in Las Vegas involving guns and stolen sports memorabilia.

The DXM Fifth Birthday Jubilee

Topic: Television

Number of Posts: 317

"If You Want Blood, You've Got It" (Originally Published, 11.16.06)

My strongest memory is of the victory parade.

On a cool late afternoon in February of 1997, Fred Goldman and his family walked out of a courthouse which sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, clasped their hands together and raised them in victory. For the first time since their beloved's death three years earlier, they cried tears of triumph and vindication -- tears that were clearly visible even a hundred feet away, simply because they reflected the Southern California sunset. The crowd of thousands -- made up mostly of news crews from every conceivable point on the map -- applauded and cheered them; it was a rare surrender of all objectivity in favor of a momentary show of solidarity with these people whose suffering the reporters, photographers and producers had documented nonstop since the night of Ron Goldman's brutal murder on June 12th, 1994.

Fred Goldman and his family turned and strided with newfound confidence along the street which ran parallel to the courthouse, away from that sunset and toward a new dawn. They had done it. In spite of the miscarriage of justice of unfathomable proportions that was the criminal trial two years earlier -- the one which pitted the people of California not so much against the defendant as against his team of legal wizards, whose talent for misdirection and obfuscation was unparalleled -- they had finally won.

They had beaten O.J. Simpson.

A civil jury had unanimously ruled that Simpson was responsible for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson -- and Goldman patriarch Fred's only son, Ron. The award: $33.5 million total.

Photographer Glen Shimada and myself were supposed to be doing something else that afternoon; we were supposed to be on a shoot in Long Beach. We were diverted oceanside by a frantic call from our assignment desk telling us that a verdict had been reached, and would be announced shortly -- and that we were to get to the courthouse as quickly as possible to meet our reporter, Harvey Levin. As the impromptu Goldman victory parade marched on, Glen and I followed closely behind the family as part of the procession. It would be fifteen minutes later that Harvey sought us out and, in typically crazed and kinetic fashion, screamed that he had secured the first interview with the Goldmans' attorney -- the man who had done the seemingly impossible -- Dan Petrocelli.

A half-hour after that harried pronouncement, Harvey was seated face-to-face with Petrocelli, asking him how he did it; how he managed to slay the giant; how he convinced one group of people to hold Simpson responsible for an act of which another group of people said he wasn't guilty. Then he asked the million dollar question, or actually, the 33.5 million dollar question: how was anyone going to force O.J. Simpson to pay the money that he now owed to the Goldman family?

And that was when the conversation went deathly silent.

I have a confession to make -- a seemingly appropriate gesture, given the nature of the subject matter.

I've always been thoroughly fascinated by the O.J. Simpson case.

Despite the legitimate claims by many that at the time it represented journalism's lowest point, I was captivated -- like so many were -- by the intricacies, timelines, characters and theories which took center stage in America's collective consciousness for months into years during the mid-90s. I was never naive enough to believe that Simpson -- as deluded, begrudging and outright hostile as he was -- would quietly and graciously accept the civil jury's judgment and hand a over small fortune to those he considered his tormentors. What I never expected, however, was that he would spend the next nine years egregiously flaunting his disregard not only for the Goldman family, but for the memory of his ex-wife and the general consensus of the vast majority of the population which considers him little more than an escaped killer.

As the saying goes, "When you're walking on eggs, don't hop." Well, O.J. Simpson has spent nearly the past decade doing more hopping than the Easter Bunny. His behavior has been occasionally strange and sickening (pretending to stab a camera with a banana), occasionally violent (threatening a man during a traffic confrontation), and more often than not, simply sociopathic (taping a pay-per-view special called "Juiced" in which he plays a practical joke on a used car dealer by attempting to sell him a white Ford Bronco).

There's obviously an argument to be made that O.J. doesn't really need to tread lightly; he got away with murder. Double jeopardy precludes the state from ever trying him on the necessary charges again. But if you knew that millions of people believed that you were guilty of a crime, and still owed a small fortune because a jury knew it to be true, wouldn't you at the very least avoid the subject in mixed company?

O.J. has not only accepted his position as America's Most Notorious, he's reveled in it and assumed intellectual property rights.

This is what, in some ways, makes the heavily-publicized and heavily-criticized new book and television special If I Did It, Here's What Happened nothing more than the next logical step in O.J. Simpson's quest to become the most loathed human being to not also be responsible for the deaths of six-million Jews.

If the incessant and admittedly unsettling promotion is to be believed, the television interview at least will usher in the final triumph of post-modern meta-reality -- a stroke of Victor/Victorian genius, with O.J. playing the part of a killer pretending to be an innocent man pretending to be a killer.

The commercials feature a seemingly tortured and tormented Simpson, breaking under the intense questioning of his inquisitor and publisher Judith Regan (a dual-role for which she was born). He speaks not in hypotheticals but in apparent absolutes: about the amount of blood at the scene, the feeling of nearly decapitating two people, one of whom, a woman he once loved, etc. And yet Simpson insists he's doing nothing more than assuming a fictional identity -- albeit one which bears his familiar name -- and stepping into an alternate reality; he's essentially playing a game of "what if." The show's title even hints at the schizophrenic nature of its implication; it's a grammatically-incorrect pairing of two opposing assertions.

The word "surreal" doesn't even begin to cover it all.

Although plenty of venom has been directed toward O.J. for willingly stooping to new levels of murderous whoredom, those who purport to hold themselves to a higher standard of discourse have saved much of their fury for his apparent pimp, Regan. She is after all the one holding the purse strings in this miasma -- agreeing to pay Simpson an undisclosed sum for his "hypothetical" admission of guilt (a sum which O.J. is rumored to have promised to spend immediately, rather than allow Goldman and family to get a crack at it). I surely admit to having initially decried both Regan's actions and mere existence as the reason the rest of the country despises the relatively small slice of land which I happen to call home: New York City. However, Regan's defense seems to be that after nine long years, she's succeeded where others have failed; she believes that she's trapped an unwitting and narcissistic Simpson into saying the words that America has demanded from him: "I did it." The fact that Simpson may believe that he isn't, in fact, issuing a true confession is relevant only in that it both makes the "gotcha" factor that much sweeter and stands as a testament to his frightening sociopathy.

The question, though, is obvious: What's really gained by a confession that amounts to nothing more than Simpson once again taunting an impotent legal system and a frustrated family?

Doesn't it do more harm than good?

During the period between the criminal trial verdict and the supposed vindication of the civil trial decision, Harvey Levin would storm into the KCBS newsroom in Los Angeles every other day claiming to have uncovered the "bombshell" that would prove O.J. Simpson's guilt. He did some excellent investigative reporting -- better than excellent in fact. In the end however, it accomplished nothing; Simpson was still free to come and go as he pleased.

He remains free to this day and will continue to -- free to issue confessions, real or hypothetical, that will change absolutely nothing.

Strike That, Reverse It

The possible action against Jay Leno by the Writers Guild of America leads me to repost this two-part piece that I wrote back in January of last year. It deals with the writers' strike and my early union experience in the mid-90s. This is the first time it's run as one complete read.

For reasons which should be obvious, it's never a good idea to ask yourself how a situation could possibly get any worse -- and yet that's exactly what I found myself doing during my drive to work each morning.

I was a Senior Producer at KCBS, a job I had initially sought for no other reason than that it would afford me the opportunity to live in Los Angeles. I had grown up listening to the haunting harmonies of The Mamas & The Papas' California Dreamin' and the siren's song of Jim Morrison's proclamation that "The West is the best." I had been seduced by the ironic nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero. I even held close to my heart the New-York-centric Ramones' version of California Sun and the promise of West Coast punk, South Central hip-hop and Sunset Strip sleaze. I put my faith in Mr. Mojo Risin': All I had to do was get there -- they'd do the rest.

For the most part, L.A. turned out to be every adolescent fantasy I'd ever conjured come to life: I was a 25-year-old living in the Hollywood Hills. I drove a BMW and was dating a gorgeous production assistant whose very name, Nicole Doll, seemed to herald my arrival into the Promised La-La Land (despite the fact that the porn-ready moniker had been hers since birth and maybe because it gave no hint of the Mensa-level IQ lurking beneath all that blonde hair). I had already had a torrid fling with a reporter who would go on to become a CNN anchor. I had a large group of guy friends and together we were well-liked regulars at the Dresden, the Viper Room, Three of Clubs and Bar Marmont. I had accepted an Emmy wearing black nail polish. I played poker with Shepard Smith once a week.

I was living the life.

I was so fucking money.

And for this world of endless possibility to open its arms and legs, all I ever had to do was leave the office -- because as grand as everything was outside the front doors of the Columbia Square building on Sunset Boulevard, it was equally abysmal inside.

Put simply, working at KCBS in the mid 90s was an experience so life-draining, so soul-crushing, so positively brutal on the human psyche that the few who managed to get out with their sanity intact, to say nothing of their careers, would go on to regard each other with the kind of reverent solidarity usually reserved for those who survived the same POW camp -- or maybe the holocaust.

My personal adventure at CBS's flagship station in Los Angeles had, since day-one, been a hallucinatory, Dali-esque landscape of seemingly inescapable absurdity. My initial meet and greet, which took place in the posh surroundings of the Ivy in Beverly Hills, left me feeling like I'd just walked into a board meeting with a "Kick Me" sign on my back -- as if everyone at the table were in on some practical joke, the butt of which was apparently me. My first official day on the job, Bill Applegate -- the general manager of the station, with whom I had initially interviewed -- shook my hand to welcome me onboard, then was promptly shown the door by security as he had just been fired. My news director was a villainous, rodent-like son-of-a-bitch named Larry Perret who seemed to delight in toying with his subordinates and peers in an effort to make them believe they were going insane. His second-in-command, Steve Blue, was essentially aboard the sinking ship merely as a favor to his old friend Larry, as he was married to Entertainment Tonight Executive Producer Linda Bell-Blue and could easily have been the most pampered, doughy househusband in Brentwood. The station's managing editor, a gruesomely vindictive prick named Pat Casey, lorded over the newsdesk with such Nixonian paranoia that one frustrated reporter eventually threatened to take him out into the parking lot and beat him to death. Our two executive producers were a lethal combination of stupid, mean and inept -- one, a troglodytic ex-jock whom I had watched demand that part one of an interview with a Titanic survivor be adjusted so as not to "give away the ending" of the two-part Titanic miniseries the story was being tied into; the other, so comically hapless that when she at one point asked a busy news anchor what she could do to help him, he answered, "Cease to exist."

Add to this noxious mixture, KCBS's bottom-of-the-barrel ratings -- the kind that made you wonder why you put up with any bullshit at all from your sociopathic superiors, given that their judgment obviously wasn't worth a damn -- as well as the arrogant sense of entitlement which can only come from being able to say that you work for the network of Murrow and Sevareid, and in the end you get something bordering on water-torture.

It was oppressive and punishing -- a daily gangbang of bald-faced incompetence so absolute, it made you long for a life-threatening illness that would keep you safely away from the office for six months or so.

Yet even taking into account the litany of individual offenses, there had always existed one singularly ominous specter which hung over KCBS like a black cloud; it never failed to make an already hostile environment nearly intolerable -- if only because it functioned as an exasperating obstacle in the daily struggle to get things done while also, on occasion, providing asylum to the most ineffectual of the rank and file.

I'm talking about the unions.

The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

And of course, the WGA -- the Writers Guild of America.

Having come from WSVN in Miami -- a shop that wasn't simply non-union, it was vehemently anti-union -- walking into a world where a Byzantine structure of omnipresent rules and regulations had to be navigated to get from any point-A to point-B was like falling through ice into a frigid lake. I had spent the infancy of my TV news career in a place where anything was possible and there were no rules. If you wanted something done, you just did it. If you could dream it, you could make it happen on the air. Everyone understood that; everyone was onboard. If you weren't, there were other places you could work. The pay wasn't great and, yes, the downside was that you could be worked nearly to death -- the general sentiment being that you had no job description; if you were in the office, you belonged to the station and could very well be assigned to clean toilets. What it created however was an almost ego-free environment. The station was a pirate ship and everyone behaved as such. Your victories were sweet and required celebratory drinking; your defeats were painful, and required even more anesthetic drinking. Either way, you were all in it together -- one big dysfunctional family.

But the union shop was different, and impossible for me to get my head around at first.

Here was a place where an invisible, intransigent line had long ago been drawn in the sand, one which ostensibly divided the good, hard-working folks just trying to get by from the soulless corporate taskmasters surveying their domain from the castle keep. It was a place where the accepted standard of suspicion and distrust between the two factions felt like a poison gas, choking you as soon as you walked through the door. Worst of all, the strict, Gordian knot of codes imposed by the unions seemed to me to be entirely antithetical to the job at hand: The 24/7 responsibility of covering the news required everyone to do whatever they could whenever they could. Anything that stood in the way or slowed the process down could mean the difference between being number one in the market and number four. Basically, there were rules for everything -- and I hated rules.

Rules were the archenemy of creativity.

To make matters infinitely more complicated, my specific position within the newsroom planted me directly atop the line between the two sides. In what felt like some kind of drunkenly concocted Duke-and-Duke-style social experiment, management anointed me a "Senior Producer"; it was a muscular sounding title which belied the fact that the manipulative bastards in the KCBS brain trust had basically just pulled it out of their asses. They likely considered the idea a stroke of inspired genius, probably reacting to it the way cavemen did the first time they created fire: By adding that one word, "senior," to my title, it allowed them to technically call me a manager and get around the regulation requiring all producers to join the WGA. As one would expect, the Guild saw through this bit of juvenile misdirection and filed grievance upon grievance against the station while simultaneously trying to pressure me to join up and pay them the required union dues. These efforts fell on deaf ears all the way around.

As they had no doubt intended, this clever parlor trick worked out well for the managers. For me on the other hand, it was like being locked in a permanent purgatory.

At best, I was a peculiar anomaly within the system; at worst, I was untouchable, neither a manager nor a grunt. I was exploited by both sides and trusted by neither. Since the first day I walked through the door of my new job, I had been an honest-to-god man without a country.

Under normal circumstances, this would've been exactly the kind of situation in which I'd thrive -- but unfortunately, I had to play by both teams' rules, and that left me walking an exhausting daily tightrope.

So I wondered how my situation, at work at least, could get any worse.

And then one day I heard the word that penetrated my skull like a shotgun slug.

Strike.

Apparently, the Writers Guild's contract negotiations with CBS had broken down and it was about to authorize its employees to walk off the job -- that meant emptying a good portion of the newsroom and essentially grinding our already limping production to a halt. Except of course that it couldn't be allowed to do that. The show had to go on, so those who weren't union -- and this is where management could conveniently pull me off the fence and into their tent, claiming me as a proud brother in arms -- were told that, should the strike happen, our daily duties would multiply exponentially.

Things were indeed about to get much, much worse.

Upon learning of the impending strike, I began to go through something akin to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief -- although in my own interpretation, there was really only one stage: anger. I was furious. I was beyond furious. I was pure seething rage that a group of people I didn't know, who had never set foot in my toxic workplace and had no idea what the handful of non-union employees like myself endured on a daily basis could make a decision that would turn our lives upside down. I walked into the men's room and almost put my fist through the mirror as I counted in my head the number of times that a 62-year-old union writer who could barely see his computer screen in front of his face had dodged accountability after screwing up a script and thus screwing up my show. I thought about the arrogant swagger of some of my unionized co-workers, going about their days safe in the knowledge that no matter how incompetent or disinterested they might be, they were protected -- while I could be fired at any moment just for the hell of it. I considered how I had left a station in Miami that hired most of its writers right out of college and worked their asses off, but how those kids thought of it as a rite of passage; I also considered how I would've gladly taken just two or three of them over an entire roomful of the very highly-paid "professionals" who now surrounded me. The ones who were about to walk off the job without so much as a look back at the devastation they'd be leaving behind.

I wasn't a manager. I had always allied myself with the office infantry simply because it felt like a good fit for me and it was always a more hands-on experience. And yet there I was, saying out loud to absolutely no one, "I hate the assholes who run this place too, but I have to suffer through it -- now shut the fuck up and get back to work."

As the impending strike neared -- the storm cloud that already existed over KCBS beginning to distend and funnel into a grim downward point -- the die-hard union people increased the psychological warfare within the newsroom. They'd discuss where and when to protest and what to bring, painting the picket line as a non-stop party -- the equivalent of a Caribbean vacation when placed against the savagery that those on the other side of the fence would have to endure in their absence. They made sure to raise their voices so that their message could be heard loud and clear: Give us what we want and no one gets hurt. As far as I was concerned, I was being held hostage.

Then came the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle threats.

"I wouldn't cross the picket line if I were you," one writer, a woman with whom I was actually friends, said to me.

"If I don't show up, I don't get paid. I can't stand this place either -- but I can't afford to lose my paycheck."

"I'd never do anything to you, but sometimes things happen during a strike."

"What are you getting at, Hoffa?"

"Well," she said, demurely feigning ignorance, "I mean, sometimes people get phone calls late at night. Sometimes people leave work and find their cars keyed in the parking lot. I just want you to know about that."

And with that, suppressing an overwhelming desire to throw her through a window as an example to the others, I raised my voice to ensure that my message could be heard loud and clear.

"Writers, I need your attention for a moment," I said, trying to look each person in the eye one at a time. "Please understand something -- you are my co-workers and most of you are my friends. I respect you all a great deal. Make no mistake though -- anyone, and I mean anyone who calls me late at night, fucks with my car, my home, anything of mine for that matter; anyone who harasses me, I swear to God I will retaliate in ways you can't even fucking fathom. You'll wonder what kind of sick, sadistic bastard could dream up something so vicious and cruel. You'll be in therapy for years just to get it out of your head." I turned and headed back to my desk. "That is all," I said, with my back to the stunned staff.

It would come down to the proverbial 11th hour before the Writers Guild of America and the management of CBS had finally worked out a deal and averted the strike.

But within the newsroom, the damage was done. KCBS, already a dystopic hell-hole, had been allowed to simmer inside a pressure-cooker until it was on the verge of exploding. Relationships were strained. People were angry. The suspicion and distrust reached unthinkable levels.

It all left me wondering: If this is what happens when a strike is avoided, how does any business survive the real thing -- a long, brutal and contentious work-stoppage, the kind that rips a workplace family apart?

How does any office survive a civil war?

"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here."

-- Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill, The Player

In the almost three months since the Writers Guild of America went on strike, leaving Hollywood in limbo, I've tried to remember a dispute in which both sides of the argument had, at one point or another, been so thoroughly full of shit. I haven't come up with a thing so far.

Since my early days in Los Angeles, beyond the strike threat that once held my entire workplace hostage, I've grown up considerably, my views on unions evolving right along with me. At 25, I was too self-absorbed in general and certainly too overwhelmed by the difficulties of my daily struggle at work to appreciate the necessity of an entity put in place to guard against abuses by the kinds of managers that existed at KCBS. I would eventually come to realize that something, anything, had to function as a thorn in the side of a management team whose otherwise unchecked impudence was slowly killing us all. Although I had no desire to join the WGA myself -- despite its constant protests -- I began to regard it as an unfortunate but necessary evil.

And when placed against the absolute evil of KCBS's mindless and heartless "leadership," it was almost always the lesser of the two.

To this day though, I can't help but look upon any union with a slightly suspicious eye, fully believing that organized labor has itself been allowed to grow dangerously unchecked; anyone who doubts that it's by and large become the very thing it ostensibly stands in defiance of -- corrupt and unfettered bureaucracy that doesn't really give a crap about anything but the perpetuation of its own authority -- needs to start paying more attention.

For the most part, the demands made by the WGA against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have been reasonable, particularly when it comes to residuals from new-media; the Guild got screwed back in the 90s when DVDs became the dominant format for home video and the writers wound up stuck with an antiquated and rather unfair deal that had been meant to apply only to VHS. The Guild doesn't want to make the mistake of being short-sighted this time around; it knows full-well that internet on-demand viewing is the future and if it doesn't stand up for a cut now, the producers -- who haven't exactly proven themselves to be extraordinarily benevolent in the past and who are now spewing bullshit by the metric ton about the supposedly hypothetical nature of the internet goldmine -- will shut them out completely in favor of raking in the dough for the Hollywood studios and the corporations which run them. Admittedly, writers for television and film don't make a fortune, relative to the producers and the upper-levels of the Hollywood hierarchy -- which is not to say that they're paid badly in general; they aren't, and don't let them fool you into believing they are. When the money to be made from their hard work is taken into account, the people in the Guild indeed deserve more, but there are still a hell of a lot of guys working at Jiffy-Lube who'd kill to take home what your average sitcom writer pulls in every few weeks.

That said, only an idiot would trust a corporation -- or any other entity that generates money hand-over-fist -- to be completely equitable to the creative types in the basement of the production line; corporations are about making money, and the best way to do that is to avoid spending it wherever and whenever possible. As far as the producers and studios are concerned, artists are little more than a burden; if they could figure out a way to get a TV show on the air or a movie in the theaters without using writers, directors and actors, they'd do it in a fucking heartbeat.

Which, unfortunately, still doesn't make a strike of this magnitude a great idea -- for anyone concerned.

By now, any union should know -- and it's only the arrogance of organized labor in general that prevents this -- that it will eventually reap the scorn of the innocents it affects. Put simply, the ones who walk off the job will be the ones who lose the sympathy of the public the longer a strike drags on. Your average American, particularly the Barco-lounging neo-lummox the television industry considers its bread-and-butter, operates under two pertinent assumptions: that he busts his ass every day at a job he doesn't much like and therefore only has so much empathy with those who aren't willing to do the same, and that at the end of his rotten day, all he wants is to crack open a beer, sit the hell down and be entertained by the magic box in the living room. While 99% of this country can feel a modicum of solidarity with anyone who's being screwed by corporate greed, the well of good-natured compassion dries up awfully fast when that person begins stepping all over America's collective toes by spoiling Leno and cancelling awards season.

While it would be fair to blame the producers as much, if not more than, the striking writers in this case, the former finds itself in an infinitely better position -- at least from a PR standpoint. All the AMPTP has to do is -- well, nothing. The producers need only sit back quietly and watch the WGA picket and protest and chant and enlist the help of pompous clowns like Rage Against the Machine and stage unforgivable "Bring Your Child to the Picket Line" rallies and eventually hang itself in the eyes of the public. The producers and studios know that the Guild will do their work for them, not only by shutting down popular shows but by choosing to picket their ostensibly innocent peers and friends who -- as in my own case years ago -- have no choice but to keep working to survive. (A perfect example: It's one thing to walk off the set of The Daily Show and The Tonight Show; it's another thing completely to picket those non-union employees who continue to work and, more importantly, the people like Jon Stewart and Jay Leno who've not only been good to you but who care enough about all their workers to keep them employed by staying on the air. Remember, in theory anyway, those on strike will eventually have to return to work and try to live in the very place they've spent months carpet-bombing.)

At some point, a strike becomes a form of terrorism: The innocent are held hostage and made to suffer for the sake of making a political point.

This is in no way meant to imply that a workforce should simply allow management to walk all over it; anyone can find him or herself in a position where a stand has to be taken, particularly in this era of unrestrained who-gives-a-shit-about-the-little-guy greed. Unfortunately, the necessity of a strike in no way negates the reality of what happens once that strike begins -- and then drags on for months.

Both sides have already lost on this one -- but when it's all over, the writers will likely have lost more.

(Update/1.28.08: This turned up in this morning's New York Times -- in its coverage of Sunday night's SAG Awards -- and it highlights perfectly what I'm talking about: "Christina Applegate, star of the ABC series 'Samantha Who?,' said in an interview on the red carpet that she was hoping that the actors union would not begin its own strike when its contract is up at the end of June. Noting that the strike has caused collateral damage to thousands of people in Los Angeles — seamstresses, caterers, dry cleaners and the like — she said, 'I don’t think we can hurt them anymore.'")

If You Want Blood, You've Got It

Yesterday in Las Vegas, 13 years to the day after he was acquitted of killing his ex-wife and a friend of hers, O.J. Simpson was found guilty of criminal charges that will likely carry with them a life sentence in prison. The verdict in the case -- which centered around a bizarre misadventure involving guns and supposedly stolen sports memorabilia -- finally closes the book on a saga that at one point captivated not simply the country but the world. Two years ago, I wrote a piece detailing my experiences covering the jury's decision in the O.J. Simpson civil trial in 1997. It was published just as the controversy over Simpson's pseudo-confessional book, If I Did It, was reaching the boiling point.

My strongest memory is of the victory parade.

On a cool late afternoon in February of 1997, Fred Goldman and his family walked out of a courthouse which sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, clasped their hands together and raised them in victory. For the first time since their beloved's death three years earlier, they cried tears of triumph and vindication -- tears that were clearly visible even a hundred feet away, simply because they reflected the Southern California sunset. The crowd of thousands -- made up mostly of news crews from every conceivable point on the map -- applauded and cheered them; it was a rare surrender of all objectivity in favor of a momentary show of solidarity with these people whose suffering the reporters, photographers and producers had documented nonstop since the night of Ron Goldman's brutal murder on June 12th, 1994.

Fred Goldman and his family turned and strided with newfound confidence along the street which ran parallel to the courthouse, away from that sunset and toward a new dawn. They had done it. In spite of the miscarriage of justice of unfathomable proportions that was the criminal trial two years earlier -- the one which pitted the people of California not so much against the defendant as against his team of legal wizards, whose talent for misdirection and obfuscation was unparalleled -- they had finally won.

They had beaten O.J. Simpson.

A civil jury had unanimously ruled that Simpson was responsible for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson -- and Goldman patriarch Fred's only son, Ron. The award: $33.5 million total.

Photographer Glen Shimada and myself were supposed to be doing something else that afternoon; we were supposed to be on a shoot in Long Beach. We were diverted oceanside by a frantic call from our assignment desk telling us that a verdict had been reached, and would be announced shortly -- and that we were to get to the courthouse as quickly as possible to meet our reporter, Harvey Levin. As the impromptu Goldman victory parade marched on, Glen and I followed closely behind the family as part of the procession. It would be fifteen minutes later that Harvey sought us out and, in typically crazed and kinetic fashion, screamed that he had secured the first interview with the Goldmans' attorney -- the man who had done the seemingly impossible -- Dan Petrocelli.

A half-hour after that harried pronouncement, Harvey was seated face-to-face with Petrocelli, asking him how he did it; how he managed to slay the giant; how he convinced one group of people to hold Simpson responsible for an act of which another group of people said he wasn't guilty. Then he asked the million dollar question, or actually, the 33.5 million dollar question: how was anyone going to force O.J. Simpson to pay the money that he now owed to the Goldman family?

And that was when the conversation went deathly silent.

I have a confession to make -- a seemingly appropriate gesture, given the nature of the subject matter.

I've always been thoroughly fascinated by the O.J. Simpson case.

Despite the legitimate claims by many that at the time it represented journalism's lowest point, I was captivated -- like so many were -- by the intricacies, timelines, characters and theories which took center stage in America's collective consciousness for months into years during the mid-90s. I was never naive enough to believe that Simpson -- as deluded, begrudging and outright hostile as he was -- would quietly and graciously accept the civil jury's judgment and hand a over small fortune to those he considered his tormentors. What I never expected however, was that he would spend the next nine years egregiously flaunting his disregard not only for the Goldman family, but for the memory of his ex-wife and the general consensus of the vast majority of the population which considers him little more than an escaped killer.

As the saying goes, "When you're walking on eggs, don't hop." Well, O.J. Simpson has spent nearly the past decade doing more hopping than the Easter Bunny. His behavior has been occasionally strange and sickening (pretending to stab a camera with a banana), occasionally violent (threatening a man during a traffic confrontation), and more often than not, simply sociopathic (taping a pay-per-view special called "Juiced" in which he plays a practical joke on a used car dealer by attempting to sell him a white Ford Bronco).

There's obviously an argument to be made that O.J. doesn't really need to tread lightly; he got away with murder. Double jeopardy precludes the state from ever trying him on the necessary charges again. But if you knew that millions of people believed that you were guilty of a crime, and still owed a small fortune because a jury knew it to be true, wouldn't you at the very least avoid the subject in mixed company?

O.J. has not only accepted his position as America's Most Notorious, he's reveled in it and assumed intellectual property rights.

This is what, in some ways, makes the heavily-publicized and heavily-criticized new book and television special "If I Did It, Here's What Happened," nothing more than the next logical step in O.J. Simpson's quest to become the most loathed human being to not also be responsible for the deaths of six-million Jews.

If the incessant and admittedly unsettling promotion is to be believed, the television interview at least will usher in the final triumph of post-modern meta-reality -- a stroke of Victor/Victorian genius, with O.J. playing the part of a killer pretending to be an innocent man pretending to be a killer.

The commercials feature a seemingly tortured and tormented Simpson, breaking under the intense questioning of his inquisitor and publisher Judith Regan (a dual-role for which she was born). He speaks not in hypotheticals but in apparent absolutes: about the amount of blood at the scene, the feeling of nearly decapitating two people, one of whom, a woman he once loved, etc. And yet Simpson insists he's doing nothing more than assuming a fictional identity -- albeit one which bears his familiar name -- and stepping into an alternate reality; he's essentially playing a game of "what if." The show's title even hints at the schizophrenic nature of its implication; it's a grammatically-incorrect pairing of two opposing assertions.

The word "surreal" doesn't even begin to cover it all.

Although plenty of venom has been directed toward O.J. for willingly stooping to new levels of murderous whoredom, those who purport to hold themselves to a higher standard of discourse have saved much of their fury for his apparent pimp, Regan. She is after all the one holding the purse strings in this miasma -- agreeing to pay Simpson an undisclosed sum for his "hypothetical" admission of guilt (a sum which O.J. is rumored to have promised to spend immediately, rather than allow Goldman and family to get a crack at it). I surely admit to having initially decried both Regan's actions and mere existence as the reason the rest of the country despises the relatively small slice of land which I happen to call home: New York City. However, Regan's defense seems to be that after nine long years, she's succeeded where others have failed; she believes that she's trapped an unwitting and narcissistic Simpson into saying the words that America has demanded from him: "I did it." The fact that Simpson may believe that he isn't in fact issuing a true confession is relevant only in that it both makes the "gotcha" factor that much sweeter and stands as a testament to his frightening sociopathy.

The question though is obvious: what's really gained by a confession that amounts to nothing more than Simpson once again taunting an impotent legal system and a frustrated family?

Doesn't it do more harm than good?

During the period between the criminal trial verdict and the supposed vindication of the civil trial decision, Harvey Levin would storm into the KCBS newsroom in Los Angeles every other day claiming to have uncovered the "bombshell" that would prove O.J. Simpson's guilt. He did some excellent investigative reporting -- better than excellent in fact. In the end however, it accomplished nothing; Simpson was still free to come and go as he pleased.

He remains free to this day and will continue to -- free to issue confessions, real or hypothetical, that will change absolutely nothing.