OJ Simpson’s death today at 76 seems and by all rights should be a smallish blip on the news horizon. He hasn’t been a public figure of any consequences in more than twenty years and he hasn’t been a truly public one in the sense of being successful or beloved in thirty. But it’s still some milestone because of what a seismic event his killing of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Mark Goldman and his subsequent trial truly were.
There are so many dimensions of this event you could write whole books about – a good half a dozen meta-topics spring to mind without even giving the matter much thought. Though it was essentially a pre-internet story it was unique to the early cable news era, a kind of progenitor of today – CNN, national tabloid culture, the birth of commentator culture. In a way it created each. The story had this criss-crossed relationship with racism and the country’s racial politics and the state of the criminal justice system, one which was upended, hopelessly upside down and yet somehow deeply true. It was at heart of horribly ordinary story about chronic spousal violence which finally escalated to murder. There was the DNA, the glove, the perjurious racist cop. The whole thing was like a universal text.
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