The “reality” we see is rich with narrative possibilities. For example, I find it strangely apropos that Simpson's slow-speed waltz with the law, which was greeted by cheering crowds along the Interstate 405, featured the distraught celebrity stretched out in the back of a white Ford Bronco, while his somber return to taunts and jeers outside a Santa Monica courthouse, to judgment day, found him sitting in the front of a black Chevrolet Suburban. Black. White. My mind – because it is shaped by particular concerns and kinds of knowledge – could use these contrasting images to construct an O.J. narrative that is quite different from yours.

This realization, of course, is the point. For I have argued throughout this book that the Simpson case involved much more than just the murder of two individuals, a police investigation, and the subsequent legal proceedings. Guilty or innocent, Orenthal James Simpson became the focal point of a first-order media event, a societal-wide celebration and contestation of dominant knowledge about reality. In chapter 1, you will recall, I proposed a theoretical model that outlined the process by which the case inflamed public passions and became known as the “Trial of the Century.”