I will agree that some of the more inventive coverage and unashamed wallowing in the fleshly details of both the marriage and the murders are pretty disgusting and, frankly, beyond either my power or my intention to defend. But it is something else altogether to pronounce, as so many have, that the keen interest being shown in the case is evidence of our moral and intellectual frivolity, if not squalor, as a people, as well as further proof that the media have forgotten not only their manners, but their mission.

Let’s take the media part first. The mantra of much of the press – that we make decisions about what to cover on the basis of providing people information they need to know to be good citizens – has been repeated and uncritically accepted for so long that no one seems to have noticed that over the years it has been inflated by many to imply something far less humble or modestly dutiful than it used to. It has acquired for them a rather presumptuous and self-aggrandizing meaning, establishing us as much more than providers of a mixed bag of useful, entertaining, instructive, important and frothy information that seems to us to be newsworthy. Instead we have become by this formulation arbiters of what is worthy and of what people ought to be reading for their own good, deciding all this with a view to what it is socially responsible for us to purvey. Heavy stuff. When we do give exceptional coverage to something like the Simpson case we will invariably explain, with more ingenuity than persuasiveness, that it is beneficial to the public for some medicinal type reason; in this instance it has been that the public will now learn a lot about legal procedure, trials and so forth. Oh, yes.

There needs always, in other words, to be what we conceive of, in the words of the Supreme Court, as “redeeming social value.” This demands at least the trace of a public issue that can edify as distinct from merely a gripping human story. If there isn’t one and we can’t somehow confect one we complain that the people are given over to trivial and tawdry fascinations. We add that it is terribly wrong of us to encourage them in this by printing and airing so much about, say, the Simpson case or the Menendez case when everyone knows that in these parlous times the people should really be sitting in a quiet room somewhere contemplating GATT.

May I just say something heretical here about these merely gripping human stories? It is ridiculous to assume, as so many of the exasperated do, that these are somehow not serious, that what is serious, by contrast, would be discussion by public persons of legislation or analysis of demographic trends or things like that. A great deal of the latter is speculative, transitory and more earnest than important, while much of what constitutes the frowned-upon preoccupation of readers and viewers – the startling crimes and trials, the passions that wreck lives and destroy families and other institutions – goes to ancient, even primal human concerns. It engages supremely serious questions of good and evil, guilt and responsibility and all the many permutations of these in our lives. Don’t be so snobbish about the interest people show in this stuff or so dismissive of its significance. After all, according to Genesis, when the good Lord put us on this earth just about the first two things that happened were a sex scandal and a murder. Great minds ever after have turned to these subjects, meditated on them, explored them. Shakespeare’s fascination was consuming. There is a reason, and it is not simply some base or squalid instinct, that draws people to these tales.

Finally, there is the matter of modern communications which have been taxed with feeding our base appetites in ways that weren’t available before, the idea being that we have sunk to new lows in public curiosity about, if not fixation on, this celebrity scandal. But even without all the technology available today, it was ever thus in America. Maybe the biggest scandal story of them all was the revelation in the 1870s that the nationally famous and respected minister, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (kid brother of the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), had been adulterously engaged with a close friend’s wife for years. He was sued by the husband, and Milton Rugoff’s history gives some idea of the scope of the nationwide coverage and interest: “Everyone even remotely connected with the case was interviewed, trailed and hounded . . . the newspapers pawed and sifted every aspect of the case . . . Rude cartoons and lurid pamphlets exploited the scandal mercilessly . . . Political and social leaders fought for tickets [to the trial], sometimes paying five dollars apiece for them and ate their lunch in their seats. The crowds came as though to a fair. The trial was given more space in newspapers than any event since the Civil War.”

I don’t mean to suggest that all this represented elevated, serious rumination on the great moral questions people face, any more than all the interest in the Simpson case does. What the people who swarmed around that scandal were up to shouldn’t be confused with a graduate seminar on “Antony and Cleopatra.” Of course there is interest at a gossipy or bloodthirsty or titillation-driven level. The great crimes and scandals fall easily into our irreverent, amiably ghoulish popular lore: “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks,” etc. I’m just saying that there is, behind and despite all the buzzing and tastelessness with which it comes adorned, something starkly serious and worthy of your interest in the trial that is about to unfold. If they are discussing unfunded federal mandates for state social programs on TV, you shouldn’t feel guilty about switching over to the trial for a look.