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Try as I might to ignore it, O.J. Simpson overwhelms every other topic at the moment. A week ago Friday night, we even watched some of the finale. Say what you want, that guy can hold an audience. Millions of us riveted to our tubes, and for an hour, and all that happened was that a door opened while commentators got so desperate that they kept telling us the time on both coasts.
And they worry that television has shortened the American attention span. What's next for national excitement? Watching paint dry? Watching grass grow? Watching nails rust? A weekend with George and Barbara Bush? A dream date with Marie Osmond? A Barry Manilow telethon? Four years of journalism school? Reading the collected works of Jay Ambrose?
Granted, there were a few interesting moments, such as
the L.A. official who said there were no special
favors
to the celebrity suspect.
Right. Every black man with a prior record of violent crime, now suspected of the brutal murder of two people, one of them a white woman, gets to make arrangements to turn himself in. Routine procedure in Los Angeles, and if anybody from South Central tells you different, it's a malicious lie put forward by an agitator trying to foment class warfare.
But there must be thousands of has-been jocks in this country, and few of them can even get into a Lite Beer commercial, let alone attract this kind of attention.
O.J. Simpson isn't just a former athlete, though. He was a TV commentator, and he also appeared in Hertz commercials.
Just why Americans presume that someone who can dodge tacklers and comment intelligently about other tackle-dodgers is also an authority on rental-car companies is beyond me.
Simpson certainly didn't appear all that knowledgeable about rental cars. His alibi involves a limo, not a rental car, and the Great Chase -- see 50 L.A. cops trying to get on television, and heaven knows what was protecting the city when all those black-and-whites were flocking like media sharks -- came when he was riding in a friend's Bronco, not a rental car.
But the idea that people who are famous for anything are smart about everything comes from the repository of our intellectual heritage: the book-publishing industry. If you're famous mainly for appearing in your own ads, like Lee Iacoca, you're also deemed an authority on politics and trade. Or famous for borrowing a lot of money you can't pay back, like Donald Trump, and you're an authority on marketing and morality. Or famous for playing tennis, like Martina Navratilova, and you know how to write mysteries.
Back to O.J. Maybe we'll soon see a new Hertz ad:
Hey, folks, if I'd just rented a Porsche 911 from Hertz,
I'd have made it to the border. The next time you need to
get to another jurisdiction, pronto, come to the people who
try harder.
This could be the basis of a new genre of American advertising. Celebrities could tout products they actually use, in the ways that they use them:
· A beefcake shot of Arnold Schwartzenegger. As
the camera closes in, we see him savoring the smoke of a
cigar: Just think how big I'd be if these things hadn't
stunted my growth.
A menacing grunt-chuckle. I put
in a lot of hard days watching my stunt men perform on the
set of my latest epic, and then comes the labor of toting
my pay to the bank. Nothing eases my aches like a good
cigar.
· Flashy video with throbbing song and intricate
dance, we close in on Michael Jackson. Pepsi. I offer it
to all the members of the younger generation that come to
my house. They love it.
· Ted Kennedy, staring blearily over his
half-rimmed glasses. My nephew used to have a lot of
trouble getting girls to come home with him until he took
my suggestion, and started plying them with Rachsoff Vodka.
Works like a charm, and next morning, nobody can quite
remember what really happened.
He winks.
· Bob Dole with a big smile. Ever have one of
those mornings when you can't find a dog to kick? When the
sun is shining and the birds are chirping? And you can't
get over it?
He takes a big swig of some vile
concoction, and his expression immediately changes to a
snarl. From the people who brought you Prozac, we now
have Zapgrin. Wipes that smile right off your face. And you
know, that rotten socialist Hillary health plan doesn't
cover this vital product. Grrrr.
· A scraggly musician with rotten teeth looks up
from his guitar and into the camera. 'Ello, mates. Keith
Richards here. I know it's hard to be choosy, but whenever
I had a choice, back in my hard-living days, I always
specified Double-O Globe Heroin, imported straight from the
Iron Triangle by Air America, your CIA's own airline,
brought to you by the same government that sponsors the War
on Drugs.
Trust me. When it's time to geeze up, don't mess
around with generic substitutes. I'm 50, and I'm still
alive. Kurt Cobaine might be, too, if he'd just used
Double-O Globe instead of some brand-X street
stuff.
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