Simpson’s trial and the desensitizing of a culture

By Chris Edwards

OJ Simpson’s trial was one of the hallmark episodes that launched the nation into 24-7 news coverage cycles. It might not have been historic on the level of the Kennedy assassination before it, or the events of Sept. 11, 2001, afterward, but most folks can likely recall where they were when, on Oct. 3, 1995, a verdict was delivered acquitting Simpson of the grisly double homicide of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman.

Much of the above sentence feels funny even to type because those facts are such a part of our collective consciousness. Most everyone who was alive during that time can probably rattle off the facts of the case in the same fashion that one can name off all of the Beatles, even if they aren’t a fan of the Fab Four.

The key players, such as Marcia Clark, Johnny Cochran and Judge Lance Ito became household names, but even bit players like Philip Vanatter, Dennis Fung and Kato Kaelin were elevated to cultural icon status for a while.

Along with the reading of the verdict, most of us can, no doubt, also recall where we were when, nearly 30 years ago, news of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco making its way down the 405, with law enforcement in pursuit, came through on our TV screens.

Simpson’s recent death, from prostate cancer at age 76, caused a wave of retrospectives in mass media. Simpson could never be seen as the Heisman Trophy winning running back who subsequently blazed a path to glory in the NFL. Instead, acquitted double murderer who was later convicted in civil court, became his title.

Los Angeles for certain had, in its history, seen its share of bizarre crimes, from the unsolved Black Dahlia murder to the Manson Family killings, all of which received their fair share of media coverage. Simpson’s alleged crimes, however, seemingly received far more attention than all of the previous crime in Los Angeles County, combined.

The retrospectives of Simpson’s legal entanglements as news of his death made the media rounds had to fight for space with the comings and goings surrounding of former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records.

As of this writing, mass media is mapping out a play-by-play of Trump’s trial, day-in, day-out, but, by and large public response is pretty much a resounding “meh.”

Strange times we are living in when a former president (who is also campaigning for a second term as the presumptive GOP nominee) is being tried in a court of law and staring down the barrel of many more charges to come, than the 34 he is being tried on in New York. Strange and unprecedented times.

Before OJ Simpson, this sort of thing would have the entire world focused on the court proceedings at hand, but the public response seems to indicate a desensitized culture.

The nineties were a good time, but an odd time. It was an era couched between the Cold War and the “war on terror.” Pop culture entertainments were good. It was an era when a show like The Simpsons (the cartoon with Bart and them, not OJ) seemed cutting edge, and not the forever-running monolith it is today, and bands as strange as Primus were selling millions of records, and were all over something called MTV, which used to play music videos.

The Simpson trial and the huge numbers of viewers it drew (in excess of 150 million for that historic verdict) set a stage for salacious, theatrical real-life scenarios hypnotizing the American public.

It’s a similar construct to what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin dubbed the “carnivalesque,” which is a mode that liberates and subverts norms through chaos.

The media landscape of today is unrecognizable to what it was pre-OJ Simpson. One running joke around the time of the trial was a facetious blame game of all things that could go wrong on Simpson.

Your tire went flat, well, “OJ did it.” Someone eat all your shrimp fried rice in the office breakroom? OJ did it.

That joke was stale even then, but when I look at the reality TV and talking heads on different news network all screaming about the same story, well, I do blame OJ.