July 11 New Yorker may provide a service by reminding us that, sometimes, a duck is just a duck.
In this instance, the weekly’s regular commentary finds that the O. J. Simpson case has elicited woefully overwrought analyses about great cultural lessons to be learned-about battered women, individual responsibility and black role models, among other matters.
It correctly notes that every sensational event now tends to be viewed as some window into society. “The Menendez brothers tell you something about the decline of California, Tonya and Nancy about class conflicts, the Simpsons about spouse abuse.”
What’s forgotten is how traditional tabloids always knew that “what makes crimes of passion the stuff of opera and tragedy is precisely that they are not part of the normal fabric of social events-they represent a tear right down the middle of normal life rather than its defining hidden pattern.”
Sometimes, looking for Great Meaning obscures simpler lessons: “some people have no shame (the Menendez brothers), some people have no brains (the Menendez jurors), and some people have neither (the Tonya Harding crowd, and, it appears, O. J.).”
As hard as it is to acknowledge-especially amid feverish media competition and both space and time to fill-some things, ultimately, don’t really mean much of anything at all.
Quickly: July Cosmopolitan has New York Times repoter Carol Lawson’s excellent overview of women who take drugs, finding that 43 percent of all drug abusers are female. Though women’s favorite drug is alcohol, they’re catching up to men in using marijuana, cocaine, crack and heroin. . . . A dissenting word about O. J.-inspired claims of a battered-women “epidemic” is found in July 11 U.S. News & World Report, where contributing editor John Leo contends there’s overuse of dubious statistics, a failure to see male-female violence in the context of societal violence in general, and an underplaying of data about the roughly similar number of men who report being assaulted by women. . . . Bill Koch of the U.S. spent an estimated $68 million to win the America’s Cup yacht race and now has surprised the sport with word that he’ll try to defend next year with an all-woman team. July Motor Boating & Sailing discloses that he has gotten 650 applications for 22 spots and that Koch contends winning the cup is “55 percent boat speed, 20 percent tactics, 20 percent crew work, 5 percent luck, and less than 5 percent physical strength.” You do the math. . . . A Cold War retrospective in the summer Brookings Review, from the Brookings Institute think tank, concludes that: “The West did not, as is widely believed, win the Cold War through geopolitical containment and military deterence. Still less was the Cold War won by the Reagan military buildup and the Reagan Doctrine. Instead, `victory’ came when a new generation of Soviet leaders realized how badly their system at home and their policies abroad had failed” ($4.50 via 1775 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036). . . . July Esquire includes Northwestern University’s Garry Wills’ “Nixon in Heaven,” in which he underlines that Nixon brought out the worst in us, as the “orgy of amnesiac celebration around the man’s funeral” reminded, as pundits and both former aides and presidents matched Nixon’s insincerities with their own. . . . And summer Parabola, a quarterly about myth and tradition, includes University of Chicago religions professor Wendy Doniger on sexual doubles in mythology-or the fact that many cultures have tales of a man or woman secretly replacing another in bed-and how the use of twins in sexual masquerades is also found in non-mythological texts, ranging from Shakespeare to Hollywood films. The power and frequency of such stories “may be that people are more deceptive about sex than about anything else. We lie to ourselves in bed. We lie about who our partners are and about who we are” ($6, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, N.J. 07834).
