June 17th, 1994—I shall never forget it.
I was only a little boy, but the memory is electrically vivid: my family had taken a weekend jaunt to Omaha, and through the fuzzy television set in our hotel room we joined the rest of the country in watching the “slow-speed chase,” the opening narrative of a thriller so surreal and excessive that it parodied parody itself.
It began conventionally enough: a woman and her close friend had been the victims of a grisly double homicide, and the perpetrator—a scorned-lover-turned-cold-blooded-killer—was preparing to strike himself from the record in grand fashion. The main characters themselves were a perfect exercise in archetypes, too, the murderer a powerful and sinister black man, and his victims a beautiful, wholesome white couple. After having left behind something of a suicide note, he had summoned a close friend and together they tried to flee Los Angeles on the freeway. (Famously, of course, this silly little getaway only proceeded at only thirty-five miles an hour, drawing the annoyed relief of the authorities and the amusement of their audience.) But very best of all, the murderer was a famous football hero and public icon! Could we possibly ask for more?
Apparently we could, because the ensuing trial soon metamorphosed into a high-profile theater for hucksters, thrill-seekers, attention whores, and other opportunists. Between camera flashes and via the front pages, more characters became distinct: the prosecution, the woefully under-prepared, unqualified and overwhelmed antagonists; the flamboyant defense, a legal “Dream Team” with a plethora of charisma and a thousand alibis to spare; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective whose stupidity and thoroughgoing racism damned the prosecution; Kato Kaelin, the irrelevant idiot jester who never saw a couch he wasn't willing to crash on; and the hapless Judge Ito, the only member of the circus who seemed to have less control of the court than the prosecution. And what of our protagonist? O.J. himself sat quietly for the duration of both trials, smugly chitchatting with his lawyers and occasionally grinning.
This was a marvelous and grotesque epic, perverse enough to enthrall even the hardened American imagination; it had sex, violence, voyeuristic intrigue, socioeconomic and sociopolitical commentary, comic relief, celebrity fetishism, boatloads of theatrics and melodrama, and a pair of heartbroken children trapped in the middle. Rightly so it was dubbed “The Trial of the Century,” but in hindsight, we were the ones really on trial. And although American tribalism was acquitted, our national dignity still ultimately found itself at the scaffold, because everyone knows what happened next.
The astonishing acquittal handed down from the exasperated jury sent a shock wave through our culture and gave us a collective judicial midlife crisis. How could our system have failed us so miserably? How could we—through the proxy of twelve of our own—have allowed ourselves to be distracted by and give sanction to the defense team's outrageous dog-and-pony show? And how else could we view such a situation, other than as yet another embarrassing snapshot in the photo album of American race relations?
The latest (and hopefully last) chapter in this drama almost seems like a hasty afterthought, doesn't it? Last Friday—on the thirteenth anniversary of his acquittal, coincidentally—he was convicted for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with some shady memorabilia dealings, a crime for which he might just spend the rest of his life in prison. To label this anticlimactic little epilogue “karmic” is to betray my opinion, but schadenfreude aside: justice needn't be poetic to be satisfying.
