The Tuesday Night Horror Show, with your hosts, O.J. and buxom Dick
By GARY KAMIYA
Hate that DNA? Wash it away!
Hey O.J.! You've hacked two people to death and beaten the rap! Where are you going?
I'm going to the Oxford Union!
Splendidly equipped to handle all your image rehabilitation needs, Oxford University offers leafy groves, an ignorant audience, doddering dons, bright things a-plenty and -- best of all -- a soothing patina of ancient, foreign prestige that will spiff up even the most bloodstained reputation.
So must Mr. Simpson and his handlers have decided before they dispatched him, like that poor wandering garbage scow that stank up most of the Western hemisphere some years ago, to the Sceptered Isle. (Apparently the skanky ol' barge's next stop is Japan, a country noted for both its politeness and its historical tolerance for death by sharp objects.)
Like a junkie searching for a hit of the addictive, bland obscenity that emanates from Mr. Simpson as he smirks and pouts his way through the rest of his tiny life, I did some cursory channel-surfing on Tuesday. But the hoped-for orgy of moral surreality was not to be. Maybe it was O.J.'s wise refusal to allow cameras in the Union. Or maybe it was just that TV, so brilliant at sniffing and leering around the edges of the grotesque, can't handle the thing itself.
In any case, a near-silence greeted O.J.'s weird and pathetic odyssey. Not even the tabloid shows offered much. The absurdly-named "Day and Date" (What's next? "Your Name Here"?) had only a cursory report, while CBS News' brief segment on "O.J. Simpson's rehabilitation tour" was noteworthy only for some footage of Simpson, resplendent in striped tie, strolling at his ease though the groves of academe.
For the Simpson semiotics team, however, that one shot was probably worth the whole trip: If the morning coat fits, you must acquit.
Tuesday night, in fact, proved to be a positive bonanza of tube obscenity. For the images of O.J. as Old Oxfordian were followed by a spectacle almost as gross: the Richard Speck party tape.
This was seriously weird. The late Speck, whose 1966 murder of eight nurses in Chicago was one of the most shocking crimes in American history, was somehow filmed in Stateville Prison doing some serious partying -- snorting lines of coke, giving his boyfriend a blow job, and generally acting like a transsexual Caligula with his Hail Caesar bangs, long lashes, and apparently hormone-induced breasts.
The most chilling moment of the tape (portions of which will be shown on the Arts and Entertainment cable station on Saturday) came when Speck, who had always maintained that he couldn't remember killing the nurses, was asked by a fellow partyer what he was in for. "Eight counts of murder." "Did you kill them?" "Sure I did." "Why?" "Just wasn't their night."
The second most chilling was when his boyfriend asks Speck, "Are you a lunatic?" "Not right now," Speck says, laughing. "I may be later."
Later, Speck boasts, "If they only knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose" -- a comment that has not played well with Illinois lawmakers, who have seized upon the tape as evidence that state prisons are too, um, lax.
Whether or not a culture of corruption has sprung up in Illinois jails, Speck's ghoulish party tape seems to give evidence chiefly that demons exist, walk the earth and are oblivious to human punishment. Indeed, you get the distinct impression that Speck would laugh and joke while being simultaneously disemboweled, shot, electrocuted and burned at the stake.
Cosmo Girl cleaves a new path In a slightly less sordid development, we note with interest that the Cosmo Girl is getting a makeover. According to yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the ultimate retro-babe will now be "in control while having fun." This "control" will apparently be demonstrated by an ad in which " a woman grips a man's face as she playfully kisses his nose." The new ad's slogan: "Fun Fearless Female."
It is certainly admirable that the Cosmo Girl is now going to be "in control," and we devoutly hope that Madison Avenue does indeed understand, in the words of Hearst Magazine president Cathleen Black, that Cosmo "is a very contemporary magazine." But there isn't much wiggle-room between being an enlightened, in-control six-foot-tall model whose taped cleavage is revealed in a leopardskin dress and a benighted, not-in-control six-foot-tall model whose taped cleavage is revealed in a leopardskin dress.
Meet the new grrl, same as the old girl.
Wolcott spanks Dowd; Vidal gores hapless Twain scholar Finally, we turn to the week's two most notable hatchet jobs, performed by famed surgeons/butchers James Wolcott and Gore Vidal. Wolcott, in this week's New Yorker, whacks the New York Times' hotshot columnist Maureen Dowd, taking her to task for her lack of political conviction and self-absorption. It's a pretty good spanking, and especially effective when he notes that her "persistent razzing of the Clintons...harmonizes with the anti-Clinton hostility of the editorial-page editor, Howell Raines."
Accusing Dowd of playing a "chick-writer" role as "a guy's kinda gal," Wolcott argues that "I'm not sure there has been more sheer girlishness in journalistic writing than there is today" -- a "flirty and confrontational" trend he compares unfavorably to the gravitas and engagement of "grownup female opinion writers" like Ellen Willis and Katha Pollitt. It's an interesting point, but I'm not as troubled by that voice as Wolcott is: female writers who flaunt their "chick" side don't seem to me to be so much trying to seduce Us Guys or be One of the Guys as to find their own voice. If that voice is grating, blame it not on the New Kittenishness but on the New Journalism, which gave way too many scribes, male and female, carte blanche to reveal their personalities -- rarely a good idea.
Signor Vidal's piece, in the May 23 New York Review of Books, is the most toothsome of all. A humdrum book report on Mark Twain's "Following the Equator" seems to be little more than a pretext for a protracted and delicious attack on one Guy Cardwell, a hapless Twain scholar who incurs Vidal's legendary wrath for having the bad taste to run Twain through a Freudian wringer, a process which involves allegations that Twain suffered from "erectile dysfunction."
Vidal has particular fun with one especially unfortunate Cardwell sentence: "Evidence that he became impotent ranges from the filmy to the relatively firm." "This is a fair example of the good professor's style," writes Vidal. "'Filmy' evidence suggests a slightly blurred photo of an erection gone south, while 'relatively firm' is a condition experienced by many men over fifty who drink as much Scotch whisky as Twain did." And so it goes, page after page of digressive and gratuitous whacks and cuts, leaving Cardwell's body parts scattered where they will never be found by his loved ones.