Helter Skelter

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of the slide,

then you stop, and you turn, and you go for a ride,

Then you get to the bottom and you see me again.

-Helter Skelter, The Beatles

Charlie Manson is dead.  He was 83 years old and had been in prison since before I was born. He is the face of evil personified to a lot of people, and yet also an object of morbid fascination. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, examines the world that Manson essentially embodies: celebrity killers, antiheroes and the ultimate flaw of postmodernity.  In the movie, fictional psychopath Mickey Knox is asked by an interviewer about other serial killers and mass murderers, none of which he has much respect for, until you get to Manson, at the mention of Manson, Mickey is impressed and refers to him as "The King," in the same sort of way that rock and rollers might reverence Elvis Aaron Presley.

I'm not exactly sure what it is about Manson that attracts our collective curiosity.  I mean, there are far more terrifying people out there, most of the serial killers that gained some kind of notoriety were objectively more terrifying.  Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, all sorts of men who killed for killing's sake. But Manson had this vision, and he was able to twist others into doing his bidding.  He was able to combine the skills of a Pimp, a cult leader and an apocalyptic preacher all into one deadly package.

If it sounds like I admire Charles Manson, I certainly do not. His obituary reads like a litany of all the ways our society can fail horribly.  He was born into a bad situation, he grew up in a disconnected and brutal world where he never had the basic security that most of us take for granted.  When you read even a sketch of his life story, it's easy to see why he became a psychopath.  What I find interesting about Manson is how well he reflects the dysfunction of postmodern America, he is essentially an incarnation of everything that can go wrong with us.

His life story is a tale of marginalization and brutalization.  He was a criminal before he formed "The Family," and it wasn't by accident that he called his little cult "The Family."  It would seem that he never had much of a family in the real world, his childhood was a train wreck, his marriages ended in divorce. The conventional way of being a family totally failed for him, so why not try something different.  Let's get the young, disenfranchised youth of suburbia and offer them something that seems like it has meaning.  Let's give them a worldview that has a purpose, even if that purpose is askew and not at all connected with reality.  It doesn't need to be, it just needs to be something that makes them feel important and included.

Let's wrap up our little vision in stuff that people already find cool, like Beatles lyrics and random stuff from the book of Revelation.  Let's prey on people's racism and prejudice, and let's convince them that our little family has something important to do.  It's pretty much the same thing that ISIS does, without the Beatles songs.

This is what I think made Manson so unnerving to so many: they could almost see how he did it.  They could look at those girls who had fallen under his spell, and see their daughters.  They could see kids who were dealing with the aftermath of a rather violent deconstruction period.  Their nation could not be trusted, their faith had never been nurtured in the first place, they had been weaned from the nuclear family on to cold gruel of materialist consumerism, and they were longing for something to feel a part of, Charlie Manson gave them something.

The thing that I am thinking today, as Manson has died at a fairly ripe old age, is how we didn't really learn our lesson about the danger he poses.  We eventually learned to laugh him off, he was this crazy little guy with a swastika carved into his forehead, still protesting his innocence and granting the occasional insane, ranting interview.  It would be easy for people of my generation to completely forget the brutality that he unleashed. We still need to teach our kids to resist the "sales" pitch from people who would prey on their boredom and disaffection, who would offer them a community, which even if it is soaked in blood, seems better than no community at all.

What still terrifies me about Charlie Manson, even now that he's gone, is the fact that someone like him could very easily happen again, and we still wouldn't have any idea what to do about it.