Life & Wisdom Quote by Connie Willis

There is something deliciously deadpan about the way Connie Willis compresses America’s most televised moral panic into a single flat sentence. “I watched the entire O.J. Simpson trial” carries the badge of civic diligence and masochistic media immersion; it signals the kind of obsessive spectatorship the 1990s perfected, when news became serialized entertainment and attention itself felt like participation. Then the punch: “and he was guilty.” No hemming, no legal hedging, no “in my opinion.” It’s the certainty of a viewer, not a juror, delivered with the brisk authority we grant ourselves after consuming a narrative from beginning to end.

The line works because it skewers two competing myths at once: that exhaustive viewing equals understanding, and that understanding equals justice. Willis, a writer steeped in genre’s awareness of how stories are built, is implicitly pointing at the trial as story-engine - characters, plot twists, cliffhangers - where the audience confuses coherence with truth. “Entire” is doing quiet satire here: it’s both a boast (I did the homework) and a tell (I surrendered to the spectacle).

Context matters: the Simpson trial wasn’t just about guilt; it was about race, policing, celebrity, domestic violence, and the new power of live, looping media to harden people into camps. Willis’s blunt verdict reads less like legal analysis than an indictment of the cultural machine that trained millions to feel like expert witnesses while being expertly manipulated. The subtext: you can watch everything and still only see what the show knows how to sell.