As the Parade Passes By

A wise man once said that violence is a parade that continues until the crowd goes home.

Never was this clearer than last Friday when O.J. Simpson led a parade of his own, pointing a gun to his head.

It had all of the elements of the wise man’s vision, violence and theater packaged into two hours of exhilarating drama.

We watched transfixed, simultaneously enthralled and repelled, as the entourage coursed through Orange County and then L.A. in almost slow-motion video, pulsing deliberately ahead, bound for redemption.

Police cars, media cars and helicopters were all a part of the devil’s own celebration and, yes, there were crowds too, along the route, at Simpson’s home and in homes of their own, on the far side of video screens.

It was a cavalcade as festive as it was lonely. Only the balloons and the clowns were missing.

We clapped, we cried, we drank beer, we ate pizza, we prayed and we cheered until that stubby Ford Bronco rolled almost mystically up to the door of the tree-shaded Tudor home against the blazing colors of God’s sunset.

Then we waited, pizza half-eaten, beer half-drunk, until the star of the parade, a celebrity, a hero, an idol, a wife-beater, emerged and handed himself over to those who always wait when the cheering stops.

That segment of violence’s caravan ended, as they always do, in silence. Crowds departed from streets littered with emotions, the media scattered and television sets went blank, their owners sated by a feast of reality that fiction could never match.

And the day was done.

*

The wise man called it correctly when he described violence as a parade. We have witnessed many of them in Los Angeles, their drums pounding hard eulogies for those who have died in pain.

But Friday’s motorcade was surreal, a moment beyond the looking glass, the Doo-Dah Parade times 10. Everything was topsy-turvy.

We cheered a murder suspect-- Go, O.J.! --as though his sad drift down our freeways was nothing more than another broken-field dash to glory, and we mocked our law-enforcers as though they, not Simpson, led the parade.

And somehow almost incidental to all this, at least spared the irony of a society on the edge, were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, to whose violent departure we owe that spectacle of an unsettling cavalcade.

The parade, begun on a bloody doorstep, had already passed them by.

It’s no secret that all of the intense interest, the fan participation, was due to Simpson’s celebrity status. We take our sports heroes seriously in America, weeping a say-it-isn’t-so to every violent, drugging, cheating, raping SOB who ever crossed a goal line, sunk a basket, entered a ring or hit a ball over a fence.

We forgive them their mortality because they’re bigger than we are. They run faster, jump higher and hit harder. Even when they end up in prison, we are haunted by the nagging doubt that maybe they shouldn’t be there.

But we put to death the luckless, impoverished, dull-witted killers whose marches to the gas chambers and the gallows go in silence down gray prison corridors . . . sans crowds, sans cheers, sans glory.

*

I hadn’t intended to write about this today, but I cover parades. I’ve covered them for 20 years in this town and 30 years in other towns, and am endlessly appalled at the crowds they gather.

This one is worse than most because of Simpson. Even those whose comments I admire seem unable to separate the crime he is charged with committing from the sweet-smiling athlete who dazzled us on the playing field.

Whether he killed Nicole or not, we don’t know. But we do know that he beat her and she was afraid of him, and that some of us forgave him that “family problem” because he was . . . well . . . O.J. Go, Juice, go . . .

I have no sports heroes. My idols write books and poetry and lead parades of social glory that change the world and soften our attitudes toward each other. My heroes stand against violence, sometimes alone on mountaintops, and counsel us to stand with them, fists unclenched, for better tomorrows.

What we have witnessed in L.A. is, once more, nothing to cheer about. It was a celebration born in violence. We danced on the graves of two human beings and rooted for a man suspected of killing them.

For O.J. Simpson, the noise will diminish and the streets will empty as the facts emerge. There isn’t a lot of cheering in the muted courtrooms of quiet justice.

But don’t worry, folks. There are other parades coming around the bend. New, rousing, festive incidents of violence are never far away. They never will be . . . as long as the crowds keep coming.