Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406300008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Maybe it's just that the hoopla over the O.J. saga seems to have taken the fixation to new heights.
It really is not new, of course. Shakespeare used the public's apparently insatiable appetite for royal foibles in numerous plays. And there can be lessons in morality learned from them.
But when does this approach a spiritual sickness? In the past year we've drooled over the morbid stories of the Bobbitts, Tonya Harding, the Menendez brothers and now O.J.
It's as if we have to have been involved in one of these stories all the time to vicariously fulfill some primordial bloodlust.
We've all heard the TV pundits and read the newspaper columnists who have attempted to justify the attention the story has received by describing it as a classic tale of the fall of humankind. Maybe it will turn out that way, but we don't know that yet.
More bizarre were the explanations of why millions of us - myself included - found ourselves glued to our televisions that Friday night watching a 40-mile-per-hour ``chase'' scene. It was the most dramatic television since the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, more compelling than the first moon walk - at least that's what the commentators said.
Let's be honest about this. We kept watching because we wanted to see if a celebrity would blow his brains out on live TV. If he hadn't been reported to have had a gun to his head, most of us would have watched for about five minutes, then gone back to the basketball game or movie or sitcom.
Those of us who were watching TV the morning Oswald was shot weren't looking for a public execution, but working through the grief of losing a president to an assassin. Though there was danger in the first moon mission, we were hoping to see a triumph of the human spirit, not its degradation.
Things are different now. Thirty years ago, there was no live TV coverage of President Kennedy's assassination. Now, whenever a president travels, TV coverage is constant - just in case the plane crashes or the assassin strikes.
We won't be caught again having to rely on the amateur cinematography of a Zapruder to see the horror played out in living color.
Of course, we got a good lesson on the continuing inadequacies of modern technology as we watched the O.J. story unfold. Nature got the better of us as darkness fell, and even with sophisticated equipment from the overhead cluster of helicopters we could hardly tell what was going on. The best we could hope for was that we'd see the flash from the gun if O.J. pulled the trigger.
Such situations seem to generate a never-ending supply of absurdities and trite reflection.
A psychiatrist - who ought to know better - was quoted as asking what could be worse for any child than waking up and hearing your mommy's dead? Awful as that is - truly unimaginably awful for most of us - one can imagine worse circumstances. Such as witnessing daddy murdering mommy. Or maybe being tortured by mommy?
Unfortunately, there is always ``something worse.''
The Simpson family minister decided the children ``have a bit of a journey to make, but I suspect they'll be OK.'' He probably should talk to adults who lived through similar circumstances as children. Though the Simpson children may be able to live healthy, fruitful, even happy lives, in some ways they will never be able to escape these events - even if their father is acquitted of the crime.
They will certainly get no comfort from knowing how the rest of the country - even the world - reacted to this story.
They may wonder, as I do, if the same people who lined the Los Angeles freeway cheering for their father as he drove by would be just as likely to stand outside a prison and applaud his execution.
by CNB