THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 6, 1995 TAG: 9510060024
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
I don't want to come across as Pollyanna, but I'm not sure the O.J. trial says as much about America as everybody thinks. What it really says a lot about is California.
Anyplace else, the trial would have taken two weeks. An easy conviction. Not in California. Those who have been paying attention will have noticed that nobody is ever convicted of anything in California. A jury couldn't agree to convict Eric and Lyle. The cops in the Rodney King case got off the first time around. Naturally O.J. walked. It's justice California style where nobody is guilty of anything except bad vibes.
The exception to the rule is prosecutions of satanic conspirators. Charlie Manson went to jail and deserved it. The poor souls who ran the McMartin pre-school didn't, but once outlandish accusations about running a diabolical day-care center were made, a California jury sent them to the slammer. Obviously the O.J. prosecution made a mistake. If it had claimed O.J. was a member of the thuggees, practicing ritual murders, instead of just a jealous husband, he'd be on death row today.
Of course, the LAPD didn't help the case. But again, this kind of official corruption and incompetence is quintessential California and can't be extrapolated to the rest of the country. It's true that cops everywhere can be hard men with unenlightened views. But in the rest of the country a character like Fuhrman would stand out. In the LAPD, he blended in. There, the bad apples appear to be the rule, not the exception.
Some say O.J. got away with it because he could afford to hire hot-shot legal talent. Probably true, but there's a name for the kind of attorneys he surrounded himself with. No matter where they actually hail from, they belong to the subspecies known as the Hollywood lawyer - all flash and fraudulence.
The Dream Team was made up of your basic blow-dried, $1,000-suit-wearing, Lakers-season-ticket-holding, Porsche-driving, cell-phone talking, media-pandering reptile. Elsewhere lawyers dress for success and employ accountants. In L.A., they go to wardrobe and makeup and employ agents. To the rest of us, L.A. Law is an over-the-top spoof. To California, it's reality programming.
And speaking of television, the thing that really set the O.J. trial apart was the wretched excess of the saturation TV coverage. And that too is pure California. The cult of the personality thrives in the land of the camera.
Imagine the most famous man in Kansas - say the head of the Grange - being accused of a bloody double murder. Would his attempt to flee be pursued by a virtual Air Force of newscopters? Would every trivial witness become an instant media celebrity with his own book deal and gigs on the local talk shows? Would some sponger living in his guest house become a TV actor?
Not likely. Elsewhere in the country, they do business. In L.A., it's all show biz. The really scary thing about the O.J. trial is not that he got off but that the rest of the country may conclude that that's the way things are done in the big city.
Pretty soon all defendants will want their own Johnnie Cochrans and Mark Fuhrmans, their own tabloid press and 24-hour-a-day Sleaz-a-thons on the local TV channels. And they will want their own conspiracies too.
That's what really stamped the O.J. trial as a California classic. The Golden State has long been the spawning ground for paranoid delusions. Californians are suckers for them, as the O.J. acquittal suggests. The more outlandish the better.
Just consider the home-grown quackery that's come out of California over the years. There's been hyperventilating religion from Aimee Semple McPherson through Jim Jones, with side trips to Scientology and innumerable swamis. The state has given birth to no end of UFO-riding, health-food-eating, cancer-curing mystics. Even cartoons like Who Framed Roger Rabbit teem with conspiracy theories.
California has proved fertile ground for John Birchers and Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army and Supply-Siders. It's the home state for the Zodiac Killer, the Hillside Strangler and the aforementioned Manson Family. With its endless plots and cults, the state is a veritable Disneyland of unreality.
In fact, unreality has been its most notable industry. The Magic Kingdom and the dream factory have sold us a fantasy image of America - from America's Sweetheart to Sharon Stone, from Andy Hardy to Easy Rider, from John Wayne to Dirty Harry.
This is a state that could believe in Tom Hayden, Richard Nixon, Earl Warren, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Jim Morrison, the Grateful Dead, Eldridge Cleaver, the treasurer of Orange County, Oliver Stone and Judge Lance Ito.
Alongside all that, the idea that a racist LAPD framed a wife-beating football star for murders actually committed by drug-dealing Guatamalan avocado smugglers doesn't seem far-fetched. To a Californian. But the rest of us, who don't live in La La Land, aren't compelled to adopt its surreal state of altered consciousness as our own. We can keep our heads even though California long ago lost its mind. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is an editorial writer.Mr. Monroe is an editorial writer. by CNB