A 5-Year Perspective on a Murderous Midnight in June

You may feel the need of a shower after reading this, but that probably won’t stop you from reading it, either, just as it didn’t stop me from writing it.

And therein lies the tale.

Tomorrow, Saturday, marks the passage of five years since the plaintive wailing of a dog, the curiously melting ice cream, the bloody glove dropped in flight like Cinderella’s slipper. Five years since the murderous midnight that, as another columnist once remarked, hijacked our culture.

From the remove of five years, the “O.J. Simpson matter” surfaces in memory like some particularly rowdy office Christmas party. We drank too much, partied too hard, and awoke late the next day, hung over, full of remorse and angst, dismayed at what we remembered ourselves doing and even more horrified at what we couldn’t remember doing.

For two years, we binged and purged, gorging on O.J. and deploring ourselves for it. Web sites and chat rooms talked of nothing else. It came up at birthday parties, in airport bars and doctors’ waiting rooms. What with coffee-cart chats and wall-to-wall break room TV coverage, employers figure O.J. cost them $40 billion in lost productivity. Even the Oscars couldn’t draw a media crowd like this did: Every news agency short of Guns & Ammo wanted a piece of it, and if it had been a gun instead of a knife, they’d have been there too.

Nothing about it was too trivial to absorb us, or to try to hoist to the realm of haute culture.

People who would never dream of opening a tabloid could step clear of the trial’s noisome tawdriness by speaking loftily of the semiotics of Marcia Clark’s hair and Johnnie Cochran’s ties, of Kato Kaelin as the echt Angeleno, of the Brown sisters, in their mourning black Lycra and crucifix jewelry and artificially perfect California breasts, as a modern-day Greek chorus.

This fooled no one, least of all ourselves.

For two years, America went slumming.

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Other murders, other anniversaries:

Come August, it will be 30 years since Charles Manson and his troupe went on a homicidal lark around L.A., killing Beautiful People and regular folk alike. That case, too, possessed the media requisite celebrity and singular subcultures, with a fillip of racial tension. That case, too, was lifted to the world’s eye as the lens, the lorgnette, through which L.A. could be scrutinized and sneered at.

Since 1969, though, pop culture has overflowed its own banks. Like an example of Gresham’s law--Gresham, the economist, not Grisham, the best-selling novelist--trivia often crowds out substance. A president talks about his underwear on TV, and a former presidential contender appears in an ad about his erectile dysfunction.

Once in a while, reality intrudes to break the film in our projector. The morning that the O.J. lawyers were cocking their ears to a tape of Kato Kaelin’s back-fence tales about his landlord and the landlord’s ex, a couple of fringe freaks bombed the Oklahoma City federal building.

In Brentwood, two people died. In Oklahoma City, 168 died. Whose names do you remember?

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Since O.J., there has been the second Brentwood embarrassment of the Monica Matter.

The healthiest indicator of each of these is scandal fatigue, evident in the fact that many of the books written about them--dozens in the O.J. case, a handful in the Monica matter--have swiftly made their descent to the remainder table.

(A few hours before the murders, I was at a gala across from O.J.’s house. I had broken my foot, and was determined not to show up with my clunky crutch. The only elegant support I had was an antique sword cane. So there I was--a few yards from O.J.’s house with a blade in my possession. At the apex of the frenzy, a friend suggested seriously that I too try to land a book deal.)

The characters still float around our peripheral vision. Marcia Clark, whose book earned nowhere near her $4 million advance, is on a cable chat show. Johnnie Cochran has a cable show too. Fred Goldman was a radio host for a time. Monica was on “Saturday Night Live.”

What both Brentwood scandals share is how important we longed for them to be--as significant and searing as the Dreyfus case, whose expose of institutional anti-Semitism cleaved France like a guillotine stroke. It would have justified the attention we expended on them.

Perhaps the day will come when the O.J. scandal’s bones can support the weight of the flesh we put on it, but for other reasons.

Future social historians will be engrossed not by the case, but by how we were mesmerized by it. When they write it, perhaps for the 50th anniversary, we won’t be the audience any more; we’ll be just another ring in the circus.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com