The Hangover

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 5

The brainy wife of the brainy professor said, ``I think the O.J. verdict should be protested.'' The brainy professor said, ``How?''

Indeed. How?

The prattle, in which such as Senator Dole are engaged, is that we must accept the verdict and turn over a new leaf. Well, it is one thing to accept the verdict as a juridical reality: Nobody is arguing that O. J. Simpson should be sent back to jail. It is quite another thing to abide by the superstition that justice has been done. A lot of white folks who lynched black folks in the bad days went scot free because white jurors wouldn't convict them. But there are those who left that age with their honor intact: they screamed and yelled, and insisted that justice was not done. Screaming and yelling doesn't come naturally to a lot of people, but the brainy wife of the brainy professor was right, the verdict should be protested.

One way to do this is to remark the little filigrees on formal acquittal, and resist their effrontery. Johnnie Cochran tells the press moments after the verdict that the will of God has been done, as he knew it would be. One sighs: someone who can compare Mark Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler can, one supposes, adduce the will of God as motivating the jury's finding. Let us in charity assume that the relatives of O.J. sincerely thought him to be innocent, and pass over their bulletins to the effect that justice had been done. But what are we to make of O.J.'s solemn declaration that, now that the distraction has been swept away, the police should get serious and search out the real killer. He, O.J., will do ``whatever it takes'' to identify him. One way to begin this search is for everyone to submit a blood sample to the laboratories. And then ask the one out of 28 million with the telltale blood -- that adds up to about thirty people, sprinkled about in Tibet, Tierra del Fuego, and Kazakhstan -- what they were doing on the night of June 12, 1994.

And yes, we really should equip ourselves against hit-and-run self-vindication by legerdemain. Johnnie Cochran was on Larry King Live on Wednesday saying what you would expect, the phone rings, and lo! O.J. is on the line. He says serene things, and then chastises a woman who had called in to ask Mr. Cochran to explain the shadowy creature who had been identified by the limo driver as coming into the Rockingham driveway just before 11 the night of the murders. O.J. says, Did the woman not listen to the witness, because the witness, if you followed him carefully, had said something quite different, and oh! how much he, O.J., had suffered from people drawing conclusions from the testimony which the testifiers had simply not said, understand?

It is on the order of rising to say, ``I told you there wasn't a purple cow on the property that night, DID I NOT?'' People begin nodding their heads. We are off to the races with the reconstruction of the scene that night in June, one little piece at a time.

What effect will the verdict have on the career of Colin Powell, somebody asked? Answer: One would hope none. But there is most definitely a danger there. When 75 per cent of black Americans believe that the answer is A, not B, and 75 per cent of white Americans believe that the answer is B, not A, then what we have is a breakdown in communication between two cultures. Either we share a common language and a common rational apparatus or we do not. It is a very very scary thing when three-quarters of one ethnic group flatly disagree with three-quarters of another ethnic group about the structure of rational arguments. It is simply wrong to suppose that the white majority believed O.J. to be guilty because he was black. It is simply undeniable that the black majority believed him innocent because he was black. And -- remarkably -- those figures remained static throughout those endless months of testimony. It was tempting for the white majority to conclude that the black majority was engaged in iconolatry. O.J. is a hero and that is the end of it.

Not entirely hard to understand. If the spelunkers were to come up from their caves with evidence that St. Francis of Assisi ate live pigeons for breakfast, there are those of us who would simply refuse to believe it. Legends, to be legendary, must be sacred, inviolate. But this is not to dodge the question: Yes. If the innocence of O.J. is a black postulate, then intercommunication has suffered a quite awful setback. (Universal Press Syndicate)