So...when does Windows 95 come out?

I feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine and it’s 1995 again. How 'bout that Cal Ripken Jr., beating Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played? Clinton vs. Gingrich, the federal shutdown. What a circus that is, huh?

O.J. Simpson, after all these years, is back on CNN, this time for armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and whatever the heck else it is that he's accused of. He got into a rhubarb in Las Vegas over some sports memorabilia that used to be his, apparently, and which someone was attempting to sell. He tried to grab all of it, breaking into a hotel room with some accomplices, some of whom were brandishing firearms. Simpson was in jail for several days, but posted $125,000 bond and is free for now. They're still trying to sort out who actually had the guns.

The funny thing is, last fall a judge handed the rights to Simpson’s cutesy-coy little literary fan dance, If I Did It, to the family of Ron Goldman, one of the two people Simpson murdered in 1994 and then beat the rap when his lawyer managed to get hold of an audiotape of a dumb-ass, obviously-bigoted L.A. cop throwing what today's sanitized speech requires that we call "the n-word" around. (Visitors from Mars, line up over here for the explanation. Takes at least 20 minutes.)

Everyone knows what happened next. With that as a springboard, Simpson’s lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran, got Simpson off the hook for a murder that only a moron with abalone for brains would believe someone else committed.

Didn’t matter. By the time that trial went to the jury, Cochran had accomplished his miracle. Simpson was no longer on trial for murder, the Los Angeles Police Department was on trial for racism. With two dead bodies in the morgue, blood all over Simpson's tight-fitting gloves, and no other possible suspect within a thousand miles, the jury was nonetheless buffaloed into returning a not-guilty verdict because some jurors were afraid they would be branded “racists” if they didn’t.

I wish I believed in divine judgment, so I could believe that Cochran had been called to account before God for playing the race card in such a repellent manner, pettifogging a courtroom into throwing out a murder charge against an obvious killer, and substituting for it a racism charge against the police who apprehended him, all based on nothing more than a recording of one cop talking like a dumb cracker. Yes, I realize that it's a defense attorney's (highly paid) duty to get his client off by any means at hand. So Cochran was merely doing his job, and very well I might add. But the whole thing brought back to my mind a line from Bob Dylan's 1975 song "Hurricane," something about how he felt "ashamed" to "live in a land where justice is a game." And if you know that song, we will now pause 10 seconds for a silent blast of irony.

Oh, but now, with Simpson in the limelight again (and once again for nothing good) sales of his little book, which he had hoped would line his pockets, are soaring, but none of the proceeds is going to Simpson—they’re all going to the Goldman family. When Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995, “African-American community leaders,” who have a habit of adopting a circle-the-wagons mindset when one of their own gets into trouble, even if he’s both guilty and a total Oreo, as Simpson was and is, crowed triumphantly that his acquittal was just the chickens coming home to roost, meaning of course that it was high time a guilty black man got away with murder for a change, rather than an innocent one being lynched from a tree, as so often happened in the bad old days.

Well, if you subscribe to the “two wrongs make a right” theory of justice, I suppose that’s true. But I don’t subscribe to that theory, and this, what’s going on now, is the true chickens coming home to the true roost. Simpson’s murder trial was the most symbolic and defining event of the Clinton era, a man guilty as sin getting off scott-free because he happened to be the right color to qualify for membership in a grievance group. Clinton didn’t only make his cabinet “look like America,” his era made travesty of justice look like America as well. To make injustice democratic is true justice according to some people.

But now the man who stabbed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, then spent the next 12 years playing golf every day, might go to prison for 30 years after all. Now that’s justice. Not the kind that comes from hiring a clever lawyer, but the kind that comes from those good old, slow-grinding mills of the gods.