KINDER'S COMMENTARY: O.J., JESSE, ZELIG (WHICH HAPPENS TO MEAN ZERO)

Have you overdosed on the O.J. Simpson trial yet?

I am surely one of the rare columnists in America writing regularly over the last 16 months who hasn't had a word to say about it. And I still don't. Why, then, lead with a mention of a trial I won't be discussing? Simple. Sometimes, in our media-soaked age, large public events themselves aren't as revealing as the spinoff industries they spawn. The Simpson trial has been a bonanza for T-shirt manufacturers and assorted hucksters and has yielded a TV network "analysis" contract for every criminal defense lawyer not currently defending a drug dealer somewhere, plus some who are.

Channel surfing this past week, I happened across one of those tedious What-It-All-Means pieces with which the networks are filling their 900,000th hour of Simpson programming. What distinguished this one from the countless thousands of others from which it is otherwise indistinguishable was the person being interviewed. There, on the screen, offering his take on What-It-All-Means was the noted legal commentator -- Jesse Jackson. I suppressed a laugh and shook my head in wonder.

Did you ever see Woody Allen's strange 1983 comedy entitled "Zelig"? Perhaps you didn't. For sheer bizarreness it is altogether unique, and although it has its moments, it doesn't rank up there with other Allen classics such as "Annie Hall," "Radio Days" or "Manhattan." Many of us aficionados of Allen's work didn't rush out to see this relatively insignificant piece of work, although I did see it on vacation some years back. I hadn't thought of "Zelig" in years, until reading a Maureen Dowd column Friday morning. More about that in a minute, but first the movie itself.

Zelig is a Hebrew word meaning, if memory serves, "zero." Allen wrote the screenplay, carried off as a sort of newsreel documentary, and cast him himself in the title role of the estimable Leonard Zelig. Zelig is a meek loner possessed of virtually no personality himself, but he is nonetheless something of a crasher. Zelig was highly skilled at showing up more or less anywhere, including the most astonishing public places, and being photographed as he demonstrated the one skill he possessed: Acquiring the physical characteristics of and thus blending into whatever group of people was already present. In the pseudo-documentary of Allen's bizarre imagination, Zelig became a sensation. Think of it as the O.J. trial of its day.

Example: In one 1930s newsreel scene Zelig (like Allen, a Jew) is dressed in full Nazi regalia as he appears onstage in Nuremburg, in the company of Himmler, Goering and the Fuehrer himself at one of Adolf Hilter's devilishly hypnotic mass rallies. (I told you this one was bizarre. Doubtless, none but Allen himself could have thought it up.)

What does this have to do with the Simpson trial? Nothing at all. Still, reading a Maureen Dowd column in the morning papers Friday, I was struck by her reference to the strange film and her apt reference to the quite literally omnipresent Rev. Jackson. Dowd, a New York Times columnist, referred to a colleague at that paper who once called the Rev. Jackson the Zelig of modern American politics.

The guy just seems to turn up everywhere. It's like, "Have media event, will comment." One is left to surmise that when the Martians land on Earth, the experience won't be complete until the right TV airhead sticks a microphone under the Rev. Jackson's nose to have him tell us What It All Means. Not having thought of Zelig in years I must admit the analogy isn't perfect, but it was enough to cause me to burst out laughing. And on a slow day in early fall, it'll have to do for a column.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.