Don’t Snip My Brakes in Long Beach

In 1977, O. J. Simpson thought he was going to Mars. Instead he was kidnapped and taken to synthetic Mars, staged at a CIA base somewhere in New Mexico. Or Arizona. Wherever. The American public bought it, just as they believed O. J. Simpson could be an astronaut. The transmission from Mars was all a conspiracy, project-managed by Hal Holbrook and NASA in the film Capricorn One. Accompanied by James Brolin and the assistant DA from Law & Order, Simpson escaped this fraudulent Mars in a Lear jet, only to crash-land in the desert. Last time we’d seen James Brolin in the desert, he was gunned down by Yul Brenner in Westworld, astonished that the Russian cowboy-robot was using real bullets. This time Brolin is rescued by Telly Savalas in a crop duster. The assistant DA from Law & Order isn’t so lucky. Nor is O. J. I remember Simpson’s eyebrows being full of sand upon realizing the birds in the sky were really helicopters.  

I may have writer’s block. It’s not all spaceman in the trashcan as one would imagine. (One would imagine nothing, I’d think. And I would think, if I didn’t have writer’s block, or indulge in a hopeless tautology.) But I have been thinking about O. J. on Mars with sand in his eyebrows, rather than, say, geo-acoustic mapping, torpedoes, and swamp outlaws—the real concerns of my unfinished future. Read More »