Distractions from our daily world - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

After surviving day after day of the trial of Donald Trump for bribing the National Enquirer to cover up, during his first election campaign, his affair with a sometimes porn star, leading up to his eventual election in 2016, I’d had about enough of sensational news. Then Editor Shawn Loughlin reminded me, with his column on the death of O. J. Simpson a couple of weeks ago, that these sensational stories just keep grabbing the headlines.

 

The Trump trial deserves the coverage, since it is the first trial in American history of a former president, although there are more trials of Trump to come unless he is re-elected President this November and can cancel some of the charges against him.
But the O.J. Simpson trial was just as sensational. The former college football star who became even more successful in his pro career with the Buffalo Bills, leading to a TV and movie career, Simpson made headlines again when his wife, who had left him, was murdered, along with a man who worked at a local restaurant who was at her home to return a pair of glasses she’d left behind while dining.

 

As if a celebrity charged with the murder of his wife wasn’t enough, O.J. captured more attention by trying to drive away from the whole mess, but was spotted by the police and followed for what seemed like hours, interrupting normal programming, by TV cameras in a prolonged police chase.

 

I remember it all well; not being able to watch my normal shows on TV because of the moment-by-moment coverage of the chase, followed by the live coverage of the trial. I remember taking The Citizen to our then-printing plant in Goderich and the entire typesetting department was watching the trial. He was acquitted when he tried on the glove the supposed murderer wore for the crime, but it didn’t fit.

 

Later, however, O.J. went to jail for other crimes and, until his death, a growing number of the general public thought he was guilty.

 

Then on the news last week I saw that it was the 30th anniversary of the election of Nelson Mandela as the first Black President of South Africa after decades spent in jail during the apartheid policies of the minority white-dominated government under which the majority Black population wasn’t allowed to vote.

 

By coincidence, we’d pulled the DVD of his story, Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom, off the shelf and watched it just the other night, seeing the long years of his prison sentence before the rebellions of Black residents of South Africa (which dominated the news for years) finally brought change.

 

Seeing the movie recalled other movies we have in our collection about somewhat similar public domination of stories. Back in 1976, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman starred in All The President’s Men, about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s stubborn efforts to uncover the Watergate scandal even as President Richard Nixon won a second term from the electorate. But the evidence of Nixon’s crimes mounted up, little by little, and eventually he had to resign to avoid being impeached, and he was given a pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.

 

There’s also Good Night and Good Luck, starring David Strathairn as the legendary TV reporter Edward R. Murrow as he fought to bring an end to the 1950s reign of terror by the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy who ended the careers of many public figures, including many movie and TV personnel, by accusing them of being Communists in the paranoia of the early 1950s.
What I realized from all this was that the fascination with the Donald Trump trial is just the latest in a long history of stories that dominated the headlines, particularly in the U.S. We Canadians have had a few sensational scandals of our own, but, in general, they haven’t dominated the news in the same way, and our attention is dominated so much by U.S. media that our issues seem small by comparison.

 

Someday we’ll look back on the Trump lawlessness in much the same way, if we’re lucky, as we do O.J. or the Watergate scandal - as long as he doesn’t become a dictatorial leader after this year’s election. Some new sensation will dominate news coverage.
In the meantime, life will go on. In 2024 we, individually, live immensely better than we did during the Nixon scandal, let alone the McCarthy era - although the problem of climate change is bigger these days. If we don’t give in to the temptation of dictatorship being a less-stressful form of government, we will live more comfortably than any previous generation.

 

Scandals like the Trump case are important, but they distract us from the challenges of our own lives, particularly if we’re Canadians. No matter what judges and juries decide about Trump’s fate, our lives will go on.