A TRIAL FOR OUR TIMES

By LANCE MORROW

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 composed, day by day, its masterpiece--its soap, Santa Monica Othello.

But the Simpson trial has a deeper geography. Sometimes a trial plays out like a culture's collective dream--a vivid, edgy, distorted story that casts up images and characters from the realm of instinct and has them act out the society's deepest passions: its fears, prejudices and desires.

Courtroom as religious rite: Apollo--the law--sifts through the disorders of Dionysus--human nature in the wild, where Medea's children and Orestes' mother and Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman all are murdered. To re-establish order, the rational takes the irrational to court. Sometimes the result is itself irrational, but in the drama, you may see for a moment into the society's heart.

Is that what the Simpson trial amounts to? A strange, garish X ray of American society, circa 1994-95?

In the 1920s the Scopes trial enacted the collision between the moral universe of older, agricultural America, where the Bible held authority, and the new urban, secular-humanist nation wherein H.L. Mencken was God. The Sacco-Vanzetti trial stirred up all of America's agitations about immigration, anarchy and the Red Menace.

And so on, through the decades. The 1930s' Scottsboro Boys (race, sex, the myth of endangered white female virtue, which was always the Southern white man's reverse rape projection). The 1940s' Alger Hiss case (emergent cold war and its anxieties of communist infiltration). In the 1960s, the Chicago Seven trial (Vietnam, the crisis of American authority); in the 1970s, Watergate. In the 1980s, insider trading.

Now the defining trial of the 1990s. The Simpson case offhand seems an unbeatably lurid end-of-the-millennium American omnium-gatherum of race (the nation's oldest, most durable inflammation of the psyche), sex, celebrity, media hype, justice and injustice . A perfect demonstration of how the American tendency to moralize has gone into partnership with the American appetite for trash-the superego and the id so nicely morphed that they are indistinguishable.

Events have two kinds of meanings: 1) what really happened, the facts, and 2) what people believe happened, the immense tapestry of folklore and conviction and myth that surrounds an event like the Simpson-Goldman murders. Category No. 1 addresses the needs of justice and history. But category No. 2 is important and fascinating in its own way. In category No. 2, the Simpson trial became a vivid shadow play of race in America. The defense's evocations of race in the trial may have been only an inflaming diversion. But on the subject of race, America is tinder dry this season.