Simpson’s Farce

We’ve refrained from commenting at all on the stomach-turning mutations of the Simpson book saga. We weren’t shy -- we seldom are -- but the clamour everyone else was making was enough, somehow. More than that. Through all of the odious permutations to this story, there’s been something untouchable about it. Almost as though any type of comment was more than what was deserved. And maybe -- just maybe -- there was a touch of denial in that response. As though if we ignored it hard enough, it would all just go away.

Well, we ignored. And it went away. And then it came back in a different form. As I write this, it’s a top bestseller. Despite all our ignoring.

In Friday’s Los Angeles Times, Pat Morrison nailed the odiousness perfectly:

When someone pulls on gloves to open a book, it’s usually a priceless volume: a Jane Austen first edition or a signed galley proof of “Harry Potter.”

I wanted to put on gloves to read “If I Did It” also, but for different reasons. The “yuck” factor in O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” account of how he would have murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman is so high that the needle soars right off the scale.

We won’t revisit this one. We don’t need to. This isn’t literature. As Morrison says so well, “the book fits Karl Marx’s useful observation about history: first act tragedy, second act farce.”

’Nuff said. Here’s the link to Morrison’s piece.