Fifteen years ago tonight, right about now actually, where were you?

I was at home, ever so slightly peeved that NBC had cut away from a fairly significant basketball game in order to bring me the confoundingly bizarre spectre of a white Ford Bronco a stately forty miles an hour (if that) along the freeways of Los Angeles. Its driver was Al Cowlings; his passenger, football legend O.J. Simpson, in a state of suicidal indecision. Both me and my mother were both baffled and hooked.

We all know what happened. Simpson surrendered to the police, setting the stage for the trial Larry Gelbart would later moan that "it seemed we had all been sentenced to watch for life." We were glued to CNN for fourteen hypnotic and bewildering months. It seemed we knew the lawyers in the case better than we knew members of our own families. The Bronco and The Juice Within was merely a touchstone--three cable news networks, the advent of the World Wide Web and the now too-familiar trappings of the Information Age would build upon it. A sustained attack of media frenzy has evolved into incessant bombardment, until we are numbed to the screams of pain.

And now, you ask? Simpson rots away in perpetuity, but in Nevada for a completely different crime. The families of what we still refer to as Simpson's "alleged" victims have only a fraction--if that-- of the eternal peace and heavenly solace that Nicole and Ron have found in Heaven. One of Simpson's attorneys has died, another founded a self-help legal website. Two of his prosecutors wrote books; how we rooted for them so long ago. Me, I have distanced myself from the teevee news glut, for better or worse. I am hopefully the wiser.

Now let me ask you this. If O.J. Simpson had gone and killed himself and not surrendered himself to the police, would the world still be talking about him fifteen years later? Would the last fifteen years of media development and over-growth have happened anyway? Perhaps. The Simpson Saga would be found in a few true-crime paperbacks gathering dust on a far shelf in a corner bookstore, and not have attracted the eye of Dominick Dunne, Gerry Spence, and all the other prestigious commentators whose two pennies, to say the least, were invested in the trial. Had O.J. Simpson killed himself, there would be no trial and no verdict of innocence to split this nation along racial lines. And in 2007, Simpson would not have had a gang of men to recruit so he could rob a poor bastard in Vegas of sports memorobilia he thought had been stolen.

My mother always told me when I was younger that what goes around comes around. No man is exempt, not even Orenthal James Simpson.