If he did it.

We won't deny that there was a point in time when we believed that O. J. Simpson was not terribly bright. He seemed to be behaving in odd ways, making unwise statements to the press, and generally compromising his enviable position as the most famous acquitted murderer in the world. And yet now our eyes have been opened, and we understand that Mr. Simpson may be the defining genius of our age.

"Revolting." "Exploitative." Irrelevant terms. From the "penny dreadful" to Jonbenet, murder has been a commodity for far too long to start raising moral objections at this point. It's 2006. We're past that, yes? Protestations of shame are as convincing as a fishnet windbreaker.

But Mr. Simpson has, if we read the signs, taken this a step further -- by commodifying a psychotic game. With films like the Saw franchise and the endless watered-down seventies gore-flick remakes burning up the box-office, the psychotic game possesses considerable brand recognition. By projecting his own sleazy-dopey persona onto the Hannibal Lecter template, hissing "If I did do it, [Clarice,] here's how it happened" through the glass (of the television screen), Mr. Simpson has developed a process for turning his own sickness into money -- a useful skill, and one we would do well to learn for ourselves. It far surpasses whatever it was that he did in football. Our memory has failed us on that and we care too little to look it up.

Since this is purportedly Mr. Simpson's warped form of confession, we will make a small confession of our own. Putting aside moral judgments for a moment, we will confess that after the "Trial of the Century" had ended, when coverage still dominated the news and obliterated any useful information from being learned by anyone on the North American continent, when book deals and sold-out magazine covers sprang up like a thousand flowers from the fertile field of Mr. Simpson's iniquity, we prayed and hoped, night and day, for just one thing: that the REAL killers would be discovered, and that Mr. Simpson's "not guilty" verdict would be vindicated before the eyes of all.

Why? Was it because we were rooting for this shameless murderer? No. It was because we were rooting against you -- by which we mean all those smug, condemning viewers and gossipers, so eager to condemn a stranger, so gleeful at his panicked attempt to flee, so outraged at his escape from "justice," so worked up about everything, all the same fools who even now are tapping their hypocritical disgust at this new offense into their keyboards, as if, for some reason, this ordinary proof of the power of money over the law were somehow different, more worthy of their contempt, than any other -- these people, so sure in themselves, so knowledgable about who really did what, jury or no jury, so altogether better than the crap they insisted on swallowing down, day after day, hour after hour, from the bowels of those worthless news channels. And many of these same fools later on bought into our tapeworm of a president, and his hype-bloated war on a tinpot nothing of a country, because they thought it made them "safer" -- and now all of us have so much Iraqi blood on our hands we have no way left to wipe clear our eyes.

We confess that we wanted every smirking pundit and snickering talk-show host and racist cop and incompetent attorney who ever made a buck off Mr. Simpson's "known" guilt to have to eat crow and grovel to apologize, before the world. We wanted a whole nation to feel ashamed, just for once, at having judged something someone which they, quite honestly, actually knew nothing, nothing at all about -- just what they thought they saw on the screen.

And now Mr. Simpson the probable murderer is still making his own buck on our perverse need to watch, and the WMDs which we all knew FOR CERTAIN were there have vanished as in a duststorm. Yet THEY are still there, those VIEWERS -- hollow eyes still searching their television screens, looking for someone safe to despise.