Jackson trial: Set up 3 rings

The tent has been raised, the high wire has been strung, the calliope has unlimbered and an eager crowd has gathered.

The circus is back in town -- which is to say that, on Monday, they’ll begin picking a jury to weigh the 10 felony charges filed against singer Michael Jackson in connection with his alleged molestation of a young boy.

More than 1,000 journalists from around the world, along with their now-inevitable electronic baggage train, have descended on the hamlet of Santa Maria in the bucolic reaches of northern Santa Barbara County. Tabloid vultures of both the print and video variety are ceaselessly circling the site, constantly alert for the smallest shred of informational carrion. The usual talking heads are rehearsing their impeccably predictable opinions -- I’m a victim’s rights advocate! I’m a due process defender! -- while various ambitious but underemployed lawyers line up to offer “expert commentary.” (Clearly, there is excess capacity in our law schools, but that’s another topic.)

We’ve all been here before.

We know the program. The only question now is: Just how big a show is this going to be?

The conventional consensus, of course, is that it’s going to be huge. Jackson, after all, may be long past his pop star prime, but he’s still the most famous person ever tried for a felony in the history of the world. Friday, for example, the European press was studded with stories recapping the 14-month run up to Monday’s jury selection and predicting that public interest in Jackson’s case would eclipse memories of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

When it comes to criminal trials, Simpson remains the obsessional gold standard, and Jackson’s international celebrity notwithstanding, it’s likely to remain so. Jacko, in other words, will be big, but not that big.

Here are a few of the reasons why, though they ought to be consumed with the clear understanding that prediction is a sucker’s game. Just recall the I’ll-admit-no-hint-of-disagreement certainty with which Donald H. Rumsfeld assured us all that Iraq could be pacified by a relative handful of American troops, who would be welcomed as liberators by grateful Iraqis. Oh, well.

One reason that the Jackson trial will not preoccupy Americans in the way Simpson’s did has to do with the nature of the charges themselves. Double murder is a gory business, but the sad truth is that we are a society inured to violence, however gruesome. Our television and movie screens are awash in blood. At any given moment, half the kids in the country are squatting in front of a video game that involves shooting, maiming or bludgeoning something or, far too often, someone.

Child molestation is something else entirely. It touches deep and intensely felt emotional and linguistic taboos. It fills the normal with revulsion. Hard as it may be to believe in the current social milieu, it even engages questions of taste and appropriateness. Similarly, the allegations against Jackson lack the subtext of sexual titillation that always lurked under the surface of people’s preoccupation with O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown. They were beautiful, wealthy and moved in the ambit of success.

You’re unlikely to have a spirited, full-throated discussion of child molestation over the family dinner table or in a crowded restaurant. Murder, on the other hand, remains fair game. You can talk about it anywhere in gore-splattered detail and nobody thinks it’s distasteful. Obsession feeds on conversation.

There’s also the fact that every trial is a kind of story. A murder trial is a whodunit, and that’s a genre everybody, whatever their opinion, loves. A child molestation, by contrast, is a did-it-happen. What you make of it turns on questions of individual credibility, on subtle, difficult-to-read clues about truthfulness. Often, they’re impossible to resolve.

That brings us to the issue of television in the courtroom. Depending on your viewpoint, Simpson was the apogee or nadir of our unplanned national experiment with televised trials. The whole nation followed the proceedings like a soap opera. Everybody had their favorite characters, favorite moments, best-loved phrases -- and the illusion, at least, that the experience, however removed, entitled them to an opinion.

Jackson’s trial is not going to be televised and without that faux immediacy, it’s doubtful that popular interest ever will reach the fever pitch it did during Simpson’s trial.

Similarly, while the 24-hour news cycle’s influence is a new and potent reality, it’s highly unlikely that the mainstream quality media will stumble into anything like the experience into which they tumbled during the Simpson trial.

In media terms, that case was a lot like World War I. The major newspapers and broadcast networks had built up the capacity to cover events like Simpson and were eager not to miss out on a popular story. As each of them, in turn, engaged the story, the others -- fearful of being beaten by one of their rivals -- waded into the competition. By the time anybody took the time to look around and assess the terrain realistically, they all were bogged down in the journalistic equivalent of trench warfare and there was no way out that didn’t look like surrender. (The Los Angeles Times, for example, had as many as seven reporters assigned to the story full time.)

That’s not going to happen again. Familiarity sometimes breeds proportion, as well as contempt.

Finally, when it comes to national obsession, there’s something self-limiting about the character of the defendant in this case. Simpson ultimately became less an individual being -- actually, a rather uninteresting one in the flesh -- than a character onto whom any number of larger social, sexual and racial preoccupations could be predicted. His trial came to stand for things -- a lot of them.

All questions of guilt or innocence put appropriately aside, Michael Jackson is just too strange to be a symbol of anything.

Whatever he is or whatever he has or has not done, it’s hard to imagine very many people projecting anything they felt was significant onto his bizarre shoulders.

That being said, who could have imagined that, years after the fact, a child murder in Colorado would continue to sell supermarket tabloids? Or, for that matter, who would have thought that a murderous fertilizer salesman from Modesto would one day determine the ratings of television news shows?

Americans, as the vogue for reality shows suggests, have a voracious appetite for the pain of others.