Has Simpson the Man Ever Existed?

Once again I wander past television vans camped outside a California courthouse poised to convey the latest heartbeat of news that is not news concerning the fate of a man who can no longer remember what it is to be a man.

That much is clear. If O.J. Simpson is innocent, he should be screaming the rage of his innocence and the pain of his destroyed family from the highest of rooftops. If he is guilty, then he should be darkly suffering the deep remorse of a thousand deaths and, finally, begging understanding, but never forgiveness, for having gone mad. Suicide would have been a comprehensible response. Signing autographs is not.

To continue to smile smugly when the mother of your children has died a horrible death and to even dare claim the role of her victim is a stance of such extreme narcissism as to deny the very essence of the human condition. There is not in this man the least evidence of a sentient being, carrying in his essence an inborn sense of obligation and love for others and hence the capacity for remorse.

Madness, even deadly rage, is at least human. Instead, in all his splendid insolence, forever surrounded by lawyers and other handlers who are themselves strangers to shame, this man Simpson stands as nothing more than a lifeless death mask, no longer really with us, and important only as the perfect icon of the celebrity culture that created him and still profits enormously from his alleged deeds, the uglier the better.

It is doubtful whether Simpson the man has ever fully existed. From the available record, it is quite clear that he has never truly experienced adulthood, that complex web of interpersonal responsibility that leads one out of childhood, other than as a fully formed creature of those who scout, select, train and market athletic youth for enormous material gain. It is they--and that includes his “educators” at USC, his “coaches” in professional sport, his “directors” in the world of advertising and cinema and his “counselors” in law--who bear substantial responsibility for what he has become.

Add to them the postmurder crop of lawyers and media hustlers who arrived when the blood was barely dry to package the new O.J. as a bigger-than-ever star, even more insulated from life in the real world where murder is not a game to be won. They will be rich and respected when O.J. is broke and pathetic, because to them it is also only a game, but they play it better. It is the game and, of course, the fame and fortune attendant to it, that through the denouement of this tragedy will drive them as much as it does O.J.

One wonders whether those who traffic in this pathos ever have the grace to admit that O.J. the probable murderer is a helluva hotter item to market than any of the earlier O.J.s, and that they are just tickled pink to be in on the latest action. Or perhaps they, too, are in deepest denial and continue to insist that seeing all those slides of blood and gore has really gotten to them and they’re anguishing all the way to the bank.

The lawyers, and that includes the paid legal television gossips, will defend their absorption in this travesty with high-sounding reference to the integrity of the judicial system. Simpson’s lawyers have already added to their riches with books boasting that they kept the system honest, when in fact they know that their legal shenanigans are available only to the tiny fraction of clients who can afford them. Instead, through their cynical antics, they have besmirched the precept indispensable to a free society, that innocents may be unjustly condemned for a crime. Unforgivably, they have mocked, with their unctuous smirks, the sacred principle of innocent until proved guilty. How many poorly represented but innocent defendants will be convicted by jurors angered over the O.J. verdict and now convinced that all defendants, particularly black males, lie?

The media that have also made a grand living off the Simpson saga will argue that this is a democracy and the public has a right to be entertained, if not informed. Easy to cluck in disapproval at this feeding frenzy on the corpses of Brentwood, but should the public not be given what it wants?

There they have me. All crumbling civilizations have indulged in escape into grotesque public spectacle, masking the travails of ordinary folk, and this one is a lot classier than, say, feeding Christians to the lions. And with the lions, there were no book royalties and movie rights to be feverishly exploited.