LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: WHO WAS O.J. SIMPSON?

Dear editor,

Whatever else one might think of "The Juice," at the very least he was a great entertainer: former football great, pop-up artist in commercials, heroic nightclubber, savior to the young, walk-on guest, cameo actor in forgettable films, sports commentator, an icon sleeping in board rooms. And who will ever forget O.J. leading the cops in a triumphal parade down the freeways of Los Angeles at a slow gallop?

A bad actor and a great entertainer, but certainly not a hero. Manhandling a ball better than your fellow man is a fortunate accident of nature and not the stuff of which heroic choices are made. Ascribing non-existent virtues to O.J. Simpson because he was a good football player is another symptom that America is slowly but surely moving beyond the moral distinctions of good and evil.

Someone noted long ago that because America lacks an inherited aristocracy, we have made entertainers and the rich into our noble class. Michael Jackson, another artificial creation of nature and who sings like a whimpering child, is a billionaire. Or was, before he was almost found out. Frank Sinatra, a warbler with a musical wart in his throat, could probably buy Cape Girardeau. So could Bob Hope, who keeps a stable of well-paid writers and never created a memorable comedy line in his life.

Today entertainment and wealth have merged with notoriety and crime to keep our prurient interests alive. We have become the captive audience of our own worst examples of excess, glued to the tube in daily intakes and mega-servings of empty entertainment calories while, at the same time, disavowing and disbelieving the fact that we are watching at all.

O.J. Simpson was a man-child. A spoiled child of nature who made more than 30 grammatical errors in the first paragraph of his melodramatic goodbye letter. A sporting Hollywood, California dreamin', pop-culture-icon-man-child, who didn't have the courage or decency to carry out the soap opera of his own better intentions. The sitcom gun pointed to his head never managed to go off in true Hollywood fashion. And if it had, it would have been a blank.

Life is not a football game, whether before or after the heat of the contest. Sports are contained and sublimated violence. If athletic prowess builds character, then all athletes would end up being philosophers, theologians and volunteers for Mother Theresa. Or, at the very least, teachers.

In ancient times, athletes were turned into poems and statues. Today we evaluate and reward them with money, and money is the currency through which virtue can most easily be turned into vice. Money is amoral: it has no friends and cannot tell you how to live your life. Money is most easily converted into power and celebrity. And money brings the life-sized, big screen images of empty lives into the middle of our living rooms.

To offer up O.J. and others like him as a model-hero for the young is to advocate and beg continuing tragedy. The roar of the crowd and the end run around life is reserved for maybe one out of ten thousand contenders. And the losers, who have tasted the intoxication of civilized group violence, can easily convert their acquired taste for competition into the virtues of the business world, wife-beating and other examples of civic duty.

Saddest of all is what happens behind the closed doors of America. A nation of gregarious extroverts, which wagers for every success in public, breeds much private and personal unhappiness. Henry Thoreau caught the democratic dilemma well in "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." In a democracy where everything is valued on the surface, many men are forced to live inauthentic lives. The more one is in the public eye, the more miserable and potentially violent one's personal life becomes.

That O.J. can hold our fascinated attention week after week tells us more about ourselves than Simpson. If he is convicted, expect no ghost-written autobiography of socially-redemptive value or deep confessions welling up and spilling out of a troubled soul. O.J. Simpson has never known who he is. And if he goes free, then he has written another chapter for the unfinished and increasingly troubled autobiography of America.

TED HIRSCHFIELD

Cape Girardeau