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From: Jasper
Date: 9/17/04
Time: 2:41:13 PM
Remote Name: 69.212.33.90
Buster,
You’re welcome.
Your observations on Fuhrman’s remark about O.J. playing golf on his daughter’s birthday are the same as mine. That’s why it looked odd. I kept asking myself, “What is that line doing in that paragraph?” What does it have to do with what he just wrote about his innocent family’s hassles with the media because of their focus on his sins (however trivial)? Wouldn’t this have been the place for a compassionate remark about the media doing the same thing to O.J.’s innocent family? How the hell did it turn into a remark about Sydney’s birthday and a slam on O.J. for playing golf? Why was her birthday and her father’s golfing important enough to him to say anything about them?
This, as you observed, is not a man who has any real feelings of compassion. He’s faking it and he is not good at faking it because he doesn’t know what compassion is. He’s just giving us his impression of what he thinks it’s supposed to look like.
The fact that Fuhrman is thinking only about himself and using his daughter and O.J.’s to pay himself a tacit complement comes through loud and clear when you realize the birthday golfing line was not an afterthought. The whole damn paragraph was a setup for delivering it – for making a comparison between him and O.J. He doesn’t say, I care more about my children than O.J. does. He doesn’t even say he is outraged by O.J.’s unconscionable display of indifference to his youngest daughter’s birthday. He just lets you know that he IS outraged and lets YOU draw the logical inference.
Again, as you observed, O.J. playing golf on his daughter’s birthday means nothing. I’m sure that he brushed his teeth, too. Maybe he picked his nose or (horror of horrors) clipped his toenails!
I agree with everything else you wrote, only I think sociopath is a better word for Fuhrman’s “anything to get him from point a to point b” mode of operation than psychopath. He has no genuine feelings for anyone but himself and no internal constraints about doing anything to anyone to get what he wants. –Jasper