O.J. the Scorpion

B&N to carry 'If I Did It'

Barnes & Noble Inc. has changed its mind about the new O.J. Simpson book. After saying it would not stock copies of "If I Did It" in its stores, citing lack of customer demand, the chain said yesterday that it would carry the book, Barnes and Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said: "We've been monitoring the pre-orders and customer requests and have concluded that enough customers have expressed interest in buying the book to warrant stocking it in our stores. We do not intend to promote the book but we will stock it in our stores because our customers are asking for it." Simpson's ghostwritten, hypothetical story of how he would have murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was scheduled to come out last November, but HarperCollins pulled the book in response to protests. Over the summer, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded rights to the book to Goldman's family to help satisfy a $38 million wrongful death judgement against Simpson. (AP)

Yeah, he's back again. O.J. Simpson. He's an ugly, diseased, pus-filled sore on your face that never goes away, always reminding you of the night you cheated on your wife.

Mr. White Ford Bronco himself.

So, what's the ex-football player, Leslie Nielson's Naked Gun sidekick, and homicidal sociopath doing lately? Thankfully, not much. But then, he doesn't have to. Barnes & Noble (proving once again that when it comes to the bottom line, there is no bottom) is going to pimp his tabloid-flavored confession of his crime.

Remember how it started? "It's all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," The author said. "It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead." O.J.'s callous words reminded me of that old joke about how a young man accused of killing his parents pleads for clemency because, as he explains to an incredulous judge, "I'm an orphan".

Anyway, since P.T. Barnum was right when he said "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public", If I Did It was going to be aggressively promoted by Mr. Barnum's sleazy 21st century counterpart, Rubert Murdoch. His network has dumped garbage like When Animals Attack, Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire, Temptation Island, and Who's Your Daddy? into people's living rooms for years. Why should Judith Regan interviewing O.J. on a Fox TV special be any different?

Oops.

Amazingly, people remembered they had a gag reflex. Bookstores across the country refused to carry If I Did It, Fox couldn't find advertisers greedy or crazy enough to buy time on the TV show, and even Bill O'Reilly, one of Rubert Murdoch's favorite sock puppets, was outraged. The embarrassed media mogul reluctantly realized that the If I Did It project was as dead as Ron and Nicole.

Until now.

Let's not forget the punchline of this sick joke: O.J. is still an acquitted murderer, and a free man. If I Did It will be available at Barnes & Noble. Ron Goldman's family had to buy the damned thing to keep O.J. from making money from it. There's no uplifting Happy Ending here.

If we lived in a world that made sense, O.J. would either be strapped on a gurney waiting for a fatal injection from a hypodermic needle with his name on it, or in jail. Instead, we can see him getting drunk in a nightclub somewhere with his arm around a half-naked Nicole look-alike.

As a child, I heard a fable about a scorpion and a water buffalo. The scorpion wanted to cross a river and said to the water buffalo: "This river is too wide and too deep for me. Can I ride across on your back?"

"No," the water buffalo replied. "If I let you get on my back, you will sting me and I will die."

"But that would be a stupid thing for me to do," the scorpion said. "If I sting you and you drown, I will drown as well."

Conceding to the scorpion's logic, the water buffalo allowed him to mount his back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion did sting him. Dying, the water buffalo said to the scorpion: "I don't understand. Now both of us will die. Why did you sting me?"

"I am a scorpion," he replied. "it is my nature to sting."

Sounds like O.J., doesn't it?

Unlike the scorpion in the fable, O.J. won't die.

He'll calmly walk on water watching his victims drown. O.J. is a cruel predator who really doesn't care how much pain the vulgar circus tricks he does in public brings to his children, Nicole's sister, or the Goldman family. He's done it before and, as long as people keep paying him, he'll do it again. It's his nature.