World Stares, Sneers At Simpson Trial
Calls were coming in thick and fast to the talk radio program’s open line. The subject: Marcia Clark’s hairdo.
Opined Rita: “She should have left her hair a little longer, a little fluffier.”
Countered John: “She has a right to wear her hair any way she wants.”
On and on they debated, two more aficionados captivated by the permutations, and permanent waves, of the trial of former football star O.J. Simpson.
But this was not Orlando or Toledo. This was Toronto, one of dozens of foreign locales where residents are as fascinated as Americans are by Simpson’s trial on charges of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.
The case is debated at dinner tables in Amman and Beirut, broadcast live in Britain, analyzed in magazine spreads in Germany, bannered across the front pages of Israeli newspapers and sneered at in France. O.J. Simpson even makes the news in China, where newspapers carefully explain the workings of the jury process, an unfamiliar concept.
The Simpson case, according to reports from Washington Post correspondents around the world, is being followed abroad not just because it involves a grisly crime with a well-known defendant but also because it displays to the rest of the world nearly every trait for which America is infamous.
“This shadowy affair combines all the ingredients of a film noir: jealousy, sex, race, violence, money, sport and drugs, along with a dog as the only witness,” wrote Catherine Delapree, reporting from Los Angeles for the French conservative daily Le Figaro.
Other countries long have enjoyed pointing out troubles in the most powerful nation on Earth; the Simpson case is a golden opportunity.
In Britain, the independent television network ITN spent 15 minutes last week examining the case as a trial of race relations in the United States. The reporter noted that the trial was taking place in the “terribly volatile” setting of Los Angeles.
Similarly, Gerhard Mauz, writing in a six-page spread in the German magazine Der Spiegel, said the trial would decide “whether society lives together in total transparency, at every moment and in every place under the eye of the television camera, or whether a world controlled by the media will have an island for the administration of justice.”
Mauz noted shortcomings in the American legal system, including the fact that “witnesses are no longer useful because they have already sold their stories to the media for money.”
The Simpson case also speaks to the spread of American culture around the world.
Viewers in dozens of countries have watched American courtroom dramas and “Naked Gun” movies. Now they are seeing a trial that combines the two. It is another chance for Europeans, in particular, to remind themselves that they know more about us than we do about them.
“O.J. Simpson is known in Germany because he is prominent in America. Should Franz Beckenbauer (Germany’s most famous soccer player) stand accused of murder in Germany, this would be a non-event in America. Thanks to the influence of popular culture and the media, America now as before sets the agenda, at least for the world’s gossip,” wrote Kurt Kister, Washington correspondent for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich-based national daily.
But on the other hand, Poland and other nations in Central and Eastern Europe are following the case enthusiastically because it tells people there about a country of which they know little, according to Tomasz Wroblewski, Washington correspondent for RMF, Poland’s largest private radio station.
He broadcasts a humorous commentary on the trial every morning, he said, emphasizing “the concept of soap opera every day.” The case, Wroblewski said, “is very American. In Poland, lawyers don’t matter that much. Listeners are very interested in hearing how Americans argue things. Plus, it’s Los Angeles - beautiful, shining California.”