today is the first day of the rest of your life without an O.J. Trial. What will you do with the hours formerly spent in front of the tube watching legal gasbags rehash the Simpson Saga? What will you do with your anger, your frustration, your righteous indignation? To what use will you put your keen analytical skills now that they're no longer needed to obsessively ponder blood spatters and time lines and designer footwear? Where will all that energy go? And how will your newspapers, your TV talk shows, your webzines fill the space previously filled by O.J.? Before considering an O.J.-free future, let's stop and reflect on what we have learned from the Trials of the Century. 1. If a tree fell in the forest and a TV crew wasn't around to broadcast it, it would still make a sound, although the sound it made would not be blown out of all proportion to its weight. To put it another way, perhaps if Judge Ito had had the guts (and the minimal ego) required to turn off the courtroom cameras the first time around, the defense's cynical and repulsive playing of the race card would not have had the ripple effect of poisoning the meager harmony that had been achieved thus far by blacks and whites in America. The "it's really about deeper issues" crap was eagerly lapped up by the media looking for an angle to justify devoting massive amounts of newsprint and air time to what is fundamentally a lurid celeb-in-disgrace story. And as late as Monday night, the night before the civil verdict was reached, there were former Dream Teamers Alan Dershowitz and Johnnie Cochran back on TV again, directing Race Card II from their bully pulpits on CNBC and Court TV. They were backing Simpson attorney Robert Baker's motion for a mistrial after the removal last week of the only black juror on the panel. How much of that got to the non-sequestered jurors? (Cochran admitted on his show, "Cochran & Grace," Monday that he had been in on a conference call strategy meeting with Simpson and Baker.) But it all backfired. Clearly, the jurors were seized with a sense of urgency after the juror removal and wanted to get their verdict out before the whole process collapsed. 2. The rich and famous aren't different from me and you, they're just richer and more famous. If the first O.J. trial was "about" anything, it was about the ability of the legal system to be subverted by a defendant with money or social standing. I don't ever want to hear another word about race in this case, or about "the white verdict" vs. "the black verdict." I know for certain that my own kicked-in-the-gut feeling after Verdict 1 came in had nothing to do with race and everything in the world to do with the fact that a rich, famous and, as DNA evidence indicated, extremely guilty defendant spent a fortune assembling a team of the best (i.e. most shameless) defense attorneys money can buy and — surprise — they got him off. Of course, it also helped that the prosecution in the criminal trial was too afraid to go after Simpson the way they'd go after say, a non-famous murder defendant. "We all laughed at him with the giant Afro in 'Naked Gun,'" Christopher Darden mused apologetically. So sorry to trouble you with this nasty business, Sir. Plaintiff attorney Daniel Petrocelli had no such qualms in the civil trial. He called Simpson a murderer to his face. And when the charismatic football hero/professional glad-hander finally had to take the stand, he looked the jury in the eye and lied — feeble, pathetic, guilty and desperate "I never hit Nicole and those aren't my feet" lies. Unfortunately for him, the civil jury saw not the silent, iconic, beloved sports hero of the criminal trial, they saw a human being. The most striking image to come out of the hours of verdict-watch coverage Tuesday evening was that of the Goldman family holding hands, surrounded by a wedge of motorcycle cops, walking with heads high toward the Santa Monica County Courthouse. They looked like the students in Tiananmen Square. The civil trial was not about money, as Simpson's supporters on various talk shows have charged; it was about holding O.J. Simpson, Human, accountable for the deaths of two other humans. 3. Low-tech is sometimes all the tech you need. Because Judge Fujisaki banned live TV and radio coverage of the verdict (as he had coverage of the trial itself), networks were forced to find other ways of feeding the verdict instantaneously to viewers. The reading of the civil verdict was a moment of televised suspense unequalled even by the criminal verdict, as news correspondents inside the "listening trailer," where a small group of reporters were allowed to hear a live feed of the courtroom proceedings, held up cards to the window — "Y" meant "Yes, liable" — to show us the jury's decision. Excuse the levity, but they really ought to try this on Oscar night. It was riveting. And now, where do we go from here? We can get a life, or we can continue to tune in to Geraldo for the minute details of the appeal and the hunt for assets. We can refuse to give this thing any more of our money, or we can run out and buy the books by Tom Lange and Marcia Clark and Paula Barbieri and Fred Goldman and maybe Simpson himself. We can vow to never again get caught up so deeply in titillating and sad but ultimately meaningless junk news, or we can turn our attentions to the JonBenet Ramsey case. It was ironic that since late afternoon Tuesday, the networks had been juggling coverage of the verdict-watch and President Clinton's State of the Union Address, a breaking news double-header that MSNBC's John Gibson termed "a coast-to-coast media train wreck." But maybe it was all for the good. Just before NBC cut away to the president's speech, demoting to MSNBC the pictures of O.J.'s car driving to the courthouse and the endless speculative yammering from expert legal analysts (including the Scheckmonster), Tom Brokaw testily declared, "I cannot remember a more unlikely confluence of events ... The president of the United States is about to address the nation about the issues that affect us all," and I have to admit that after almost three years of O.J. Junkiedom, I think old Tom helped me see the light. Believe it or not, O.J. is insignificant in the scheme of things and no matter what the jury decided, the republic would stand. The only people who need closure here are the Brown and Goldman families — not me, not you, not Geraldo. So farewell to all that. I'm outta here. But I'm still relieved the bastard finally got his due.
on Saturday afternoon, I walked blearily out of my apartment on Nob Hill, chasing some carbonated sugar water after a night that had begun at a South of Market dive and ended seven hours later in North Beach. The San Francisco Examiner was lying on the doorstep. I glanced at the headline. "Herb Caen dies," it read. I stared at the paper for a moment. Then I looked slowly at the houses across the street, past the humming murmur of the cable car lines, up through the maze of telephone lines, into the cloud-torn gray sky. For a moment the city's heart, too, seemed to have stopped beating. Then it came back to life, and it was changed. It was not diminished: It was bigger. It was older, wiser, more haunted by history. It reached further back into the past, a past of neon jazz joints and starlets and big-nosed convertibles, glasses glowing in dark rooms, muscular men unloading cargo on the waterfront, white apartments rising up in the fog. The city had arranged itself around its chronicler, the way the forest rearranges itself around the empty place when one of the big trees fall. It had always been his city, it struck me as I walked up Leavenworth Street, but it was only now that I really knew it. Herb Caen was two things above all: He was a great newspaperman, and he was a great lover of San Francisco. What made him unique was the way he brought these two things together. He brought a deadline poetry to the life in the streets, the roistering and gossip and tragedy of 700,000 lives. His column was the city's agora, its Roman forum. The scoops, the sparkling one-liners, the praise and derision, the endless dish he served up brought the city's people together, if only for 10 minutes over a latte. But he also brought a tough, unabashed lyricism to the beauty of the place itself. The city, for him, was neither just a pretty postcard nor a source of three-dot anecdotes for his daily thousand words — it was a living entity, a place that at once included and transcended its inhabitants' destinies. There is something hilarious, and touching, and absolutely right about the fact that one of Caen's wives named San Francisco as a co-respondent in her divorce suit. She was the one he never left. Caen was a living link to an almost mythical age, the fedora-hat era when a sweaty glamour hovered over the whole sidewalk-pounding enterprise of being a daily man. Writing a daily column, as he did for 58 years, is wiltingly hard work, but he did it with a panache and muscular zest that made the macho creed civilized. During my five years at the Chronicle's great rival, the Examiner, where he was lured for a spell in the '50s before returning to the Chron for good, I would sometimes see him parking his white Jaguar and strolling, with a Jeeves-like insouciance, down Fifth Street, homburg jauntily on his head. The lesson of that supreme saunter was simple: You gotta enjoy it, all of it. Just knowing that he was there, pounding away in the same building as me on his old Royal, was as reassuring as a flask in the pocket or money in the bank. In an age when journalism seems to have lost its style, its eccentricity, its balls, Caen was a Stoli-quaffing, nightclub-going, skirt-admiring anchor. And then there was his humanity. Caen upheld the great democratic tradition of the American press — one fading as TV stars and even newspapermen move into income brackets and sensibilities far removed from the people they're writing about. Caen hobnobbed with the wealthy and powerful, he didn't suffer fools gladly, but he always retained the humility of the newsman, a solidarity with the taxi drivers and waitresses and secretaries and dock workers who made the city work. His early opposition to the Vietnam War, his opposition to all forms of bigotry, truly marked him as the apt chronicler for this most liberal of American cities. As the years went on, and the city moved further away from the enchanted, sparkling Baghdad-by-the-Bay years that he loved best, his tolerance acquired a pathos, an even greater emotional resonance: You knew that he was not entirely happy with what had happened to his city, but he refused to turn sour and bitter. He kept up with what was going on, could laugh at and appreciate the blue-haired punks on Folsom Street just as 40 years earlier he had laughed at and appreciated the hepcats in the Beach. Duke Ellington, I think, once said that he stayed young by playing with young cats. Caen, old drummer that he was, kept swinging until the end. He taught a lot of us '60s kids who had erroneously thought that we had the market on tolerance — look at us now in our judgments and weep! — what that word really means. He taught us how to grow old. Herb Caen said he wanted his gravestone to read "He never missed a deadline." That is a fine and fitting epitaph for a man who upheld the best traditions of his profession — and had a hell of a good time doing it. But his true memorial is larger. It is all around the city, in every corner of this jumbled steep old treasure-hunt village running away from civilization and down to the sea, from the restless wind-blown waves at Ocean Beach to the rotting piers at Red's Java House, from the filthy numberless byways of Chinatown to the bleached stark vistas on Twin Peaks, from the lights in the big houses on the hills to the music in the little ones in the valleys. It comes alive and will always come alive every time anyone reaches far enough into imagination and tolerance to see the city as he did: whole and alive, intricate and majestic, a place in the heart at continent's end, a friend for life when other friends fade. As long as people love San Francisco, Herb Caen will live on. Thanks, Herb. We'll see you around town.
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