ABSTRACT
For Time’s Lance Morrow, writing just the day before the O.J. Simpson verdict, “The easiest meaning of the trial is that we live in a golden age of high trash, an Elizabethan epoch of lowest-common-denominator, everything-is-entertainment daytime drama that in Judge Ito’s courtroom composes, day by day, its masterpiece – its soap, Santa Monica Othello” (1995: 28). In the aftermath of its last episode, as that drama moved to other time slots and the talking cures began, one emerging cultural scenario began to resemble Maurice Dowling’s 1834 Othello Travestie, An Operatic Burlesque Burletta, where, at the close, Desdemona rises from the murder bed to accuse Iago, who deters Othello from cutting his throat, and all heartily agree with Roderigo’s “Let the past be all forgot” (Dowling 1834: 36). But, once tragedy had given way to a pulp-fiction horoscope of race, sex, celebrity, justice and injustice, there was no catharsis. Nor, in a nation demonstrating its deep divisions by symbolic action and by calls for equal treatment by law, for citizen oversight of the police, and for protection against domestic abuse, did communal forgetting seem possible. Over a year later, as the outcome of the Browns’ and Goldmans’ wrongful death civil suit brought a multi-million-dollar judgment against Simpson, the genre shifted once more. By taking the “uppity negro” down from the top, white America had composed another ending, exacting the perfect capitalist revenge.
