When Juicy Gossip Got a New Meaning

In 10 years, Simpson the non-murderer has had more classroom exposure than Simpson the USC student ever did, fleshing out what Braudy calls the penumbra of his own cultural shadow. A Penn State philosophy lecturer's essay argued that "Forrest Gump" and O.J. Simpson mark the death of the age of reason. Simpson's name appears with Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" and semiotics in an Amsterdam academic program. He figured with Marx and Engels on a Pomona College reading list. Journals like Psychological Science, with circulations not much bigger than the Simpson jury pool, used the case as a petri dish of human nature. Someone got a book deal "channeling" Joseph Conrad, cutting and pasting quotes from Conrad's works into a commentary on O.J.

I drove back to chez O.J. this week. His house has been razed, and a new one stands on its footprint. The curb bears a different house number, just as the Reagans had their Bel-Air street address changed from the satanic 666 to 668.

Those aren't two names I would otherwise put together, Reagan and Simpson. The saddest thing I heard this week was from someone else who did, Anne Clar, a 59-year-old Bel-Air woman. Ten years ago, she said, she'd gone to the overpass where Sunset Boulevard meets the 405 to watch O.J.'s white Bronco roll by. She felt she had to do the same for Ronald Reagan's hearse. "This," she said, "is a famous corner now."

We were Simpson's conspirators. He did or didn't leave two hacked-up bodies. But he did escort us into a culture where fame and infamy are so conflated that you can't slip a stiletto blade between them. So Charles Lindbergh, family man, is Charles Manson, family man. Teddy Roosevelt, environmentalist, is Ted Kaczynski, environmentalist. And National Public Radio is the National Enquirer.

At another trial of the century -- a hearing, actually -- someone finally had the guts to demand of the inquisitor who had made his name by turning associations into infamy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

The answer was the same 50 years ago, at the Army-McCarthy hearings, as it is now. No -- there's no percentage in it.