The Sixties: Reflections On Manson
by
R.E. Prindle
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| Charles Manson |
Coming like
a clap of thunder from a clear sky the Charles Manson murders of Summer ’69
caused all eyes to go wide. The
psychological impact was greater than the A-Bomb that, after all, happened far
away. Gruesome murders were nothing new. Hillside Stranglers, Boston Stranglers,
Richard Speck, Charlies Starkweather and Whitman…we’d seen them all. So what was so spooky about Manson? Perhaps the sense of disaster had been
building all decade long and when the explosion finally came, while expected, it
was more devastating than imagined.
Manson
himself was an odd one. At the time seen
only as a lifelong petty criminal recently released from a spell in the joint
he seemed so unlikely as a spectre of evil.
He was soon elevated to the status of an unbelievable arch-villain,
capable of almost superhuman malevolence, the very face of evil. It was the end of the Sixties, a haze of degeneration
was hanging in the air.
The
degeneration began at the other end of the Sixties. In the beginning. Crimes don’t just happen, the way has to be
prepared for them. The antecedents that
led to the conclusion came to be in place.
Without the right conditions a certain type of crime can’t be committed.
Charlie
Manson was the result of a whole string of conditions mostly beyond his control
or influence, some of them going back quite a ways. The rise of Satanism and the death of God in
1966 as proclaimed by Time magazine on the one hand and Ira Levin’s novel
Rosemary’s Baby on the other was the tipping point of the decade though how
many people understood is the question.
I certainly didn’t although I witnessed both. I had an uneasy feeling building as society
seemed to be decaying around me, but, you know, those were squally days.
While many
were standing up claiming to be the Great Satan, Kenneth Anger, Anton LaVey and Mick Jagger come to mind, the actual
Great Satan had gone back underground in 1938.
His earthly name was Sigmund Freud.
Manson claimed to be the Great Satan and Jesus combined. Was he Sigmund Freud’s successor? Or just a satanic prophet?
Freud had
served his apprenticeship before arising in 1900, the year attributed to his
masterpiece The Interpretation Of Dreams.
Contrary to common belief Freud did not invent the Unconscious, although
he did frame its interpretation, in fact the unconscious had been a staple of
speculation since Franz Anton Mesmer began the codified notion of the
subliminal processes of the mind in the eighteenth century. The great French investigators Charcot,
Pierre Janet, Gustave Le Bon, Liebeault and Bernstein had done the spadework,
the heavy lifting. What Freud did was
organize the research into his specific interpretation of the unconscious; a
view that suited his ulterior motives that were less than scientific.
As a motto
for his masterpiece Freud used a Latin quote that translated roughly as If I
cannot be rewarded by God then I will raise Satan. And that is just what he did. In Charles Manson you see a culmination of
Freud’s work.
Freud
realized that dreams were the unconscious at work. He didn’t fully understand the mechanism but
as he put it, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. He made his interpretation of the unconscious
the abode of demons and he sought to release them, turn them loose to destroy
morality. Freud reveled in
destruction. As his disciple Isidore
Sadger put it: Oh yes, Freud was a great
sadist.
Nor did what
Freud was aiming at escape the attention of some of his contemporaries. The novelist D.H. Lawrence zeroed right in on
Freud’s objective. Freud was not aiming
for a reformation of morals but their complete elimination. By the end of the Sixties Freud had succeeded
for after Manson came Mick Jagger at Altamont.
Harbingers
appeared along the way of course. When
Ursula Andress stepped from the wave like the goddess Aphrodite of old in
1962’s Dr. No it seemed to herald a new day or perhaps the old day of the
Ancient Evil returning. Andress
represented the new Anima for the times, the uninhibited sex goddess whose
corresponding Animus was represented by Sean Conner as .007, James Bond with a
license to kill. Bond was free to shoot
anybody he wanted, no consequences. Bond
had no morals beyond the expedient. Thus
the decade would be characterized by the Summer Of Love and the Winter of
Despair.
While Freud
prepared the grounds with his psycho-analysis propaganda developments played into his hands
to create a perfect storm for his purposes.
Himself a cocaine addict Freud understood perfectly the effects of drugs
on morals.
While drugs
such as amphetamines, morphine, heroin and cocaine had been in use for many
decades before the Sixties dawned they were to become more readily available. Freud himself was well aware of the effects
of drugs on the mind as he had been a cocaine addict most of his adult
life. He was at one time an avid
advocate pushing his drug on his associates and even his wife.
New York
City as the Sixties began was in the throes of an amphetamine deluge. Dr. Feelgoods such as the Jewish immigrant
from Germany, Max Jacobson, were dispensing huge injections wholesale. While amphetamines were understood to be a
dangerous drug they were still legal while Jacobson had devised a vitamin-amphetamine
cocktail that was supposed to be safe as it was thought, or hoped, that the
vitamins negated the harmful effect of the amphetamines.
Thus
everyone from high society to the Bohemians of the Village was blasting holes in
their psyche. That other great cultural
node of the country, LA, was not far behind NYC. LA had had a drug culture for decades, hip to
all the latest developments as they arrived.
LSD was old hat in LA long before Tim Leary arrived bearing his gospel
of LSD in 1960.
While not particularly
widespread before the Sixties, but still in extensive use, consumption
blossomed as the Sixties progressed.
Cocaine the great destroyer, emerged into prominence in the late
Sixties. Uppers and downers ruled the
mind of the generation.
Let me say
here that there is no difference between licit and illicit drugs. A pill from a doctor is exactly the same as a
pill from a street pusher so while Hippies were deemed to be taking drugs the
straights took those same drugs as prescription medicine. Those prescriptions amounted to billions of
pills a year so one might say that the whole country was doped up.
Drugs tend
to concentrate your attention on yourself while removing moral
inhibitions. Morality then becomes a
matter of expediency. The whole country
became increasingly criminal minded. It
was also at this time that the Mafia dominated the country. The failure of the authorities to suppress or
confine the mob also undermined morality.
By the seventies murder and mayhem were endemic to the culture. Manson was not unique nor were his victims
innocent of wrong doing themselves. The
story runs deeper.
As the
decade began the record industry was very small blossoming from sixty million
dollars in the late fifties to billions in the seventies. The huge increase was fueled by the generational
increase of interest as ‘music’ replaced literature as the culture bearer.
Through
music the culture was then seized by the revolutionary cadre. On the West Coast the two major centers were
San Francisco and Los Angeles although both Portland and Seattle were
significant contributors. On the East
Coast, namely NYC the major revolutionary group was the folk movement of
Greenwich Village. One may say that they
were led by Pete Seeger until Bob Dylan arrived one night, say, from nowhere,
Hibbing Minnesota, to take the movement big time and in a different direction.
Dylan was
total negativity which set the tone for the decade. In the year ’66, year one of the Satanic
dispensation, the birth of the son of Satan gook place in the Dakota apartments,
allegorically but still in a psychological real way. In association with this, in my mind at
least, was the first record of the Doors in ’66. It contained the song that more than Dylan
ended what had gone on before. That song
was The End. In its own way it
prefigured the atmosphere that created Charles Manson.
In the song
Morrison intones in his ominous baritone that a murderer walks a hallway into
his parents’ bedroom where he announced the Freudian Oedipus mantra to his
parents: Father, I want to kill
you…Mother, I want to…the rest is obliterated by screams and electronics but
the message was clear. By 1966 a
significant number of brains were addled by drugs and actually Freudian
psychology so that the song had a powerful mind changing effect, releasing
subconscious desires of every kind. The
effect was repeated and amplified endlessly by subsequent bands. The generation then was raised to a fever
pitch of revolutionary zeal and released, or liberated as the term was,
repressed sexual desires. This was the
season of the witch as Donovan sang, or the day of the toad of which Dalton
Trumbo complained. Perverted activists
came out of the wall as though summoned from hell.
Thus,
Charles Manson.
Manson was
not a fortunate child. Born out of
wedlock in West Virginia he was shuffled around as a child going from one
terrible environment to the next until he found himself in the worst, a prison
cell. Manson was an intelligent man who
imbibed an education of sufficient worth to allow him to read and speak well. The guy was no fool. Along the way he learned to play guitar in
prison. He was sufficiently adept to
pass as a musician in LA among musicians.
He was well known in Laurel Canyon and admired. He was actually part of it.
He was also,
if not part of it, associated in some manner with the Process Church Of The
Final Judgment, usually referred to simply as The Process. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull had
associations with the Process. The
Process as one might conjecture was a Satanist outfit. Thus, while one may surmise that Manson was familiar
with Satanist lore from prison, he quickly assimilated to LA Satanism
envisioning himself as both Christ and Satan, the dichotomy of Christ and
anti-Christ was realized in his person to his satisfaction.
In San
Francisco after his release from prison in 1967 in which, by the way, he was
quite happy he soon acquired an entourage of girls and lost boys with which the
Haight-Ashbury teemed. All of them were
bonkered on massive doses of lysergic acid- LSD. SF was Flashback City. Stanley Owsley kept the Haight awash in very
high quality acid.
While San
Francisco is where the drop out and runaways congregated they were a loser
crowd. They were not material for much
of anything. Anybody with any sense knew
that LA was where the action was. Hence
1968 found Manson drifting down and establishing himself and his entourage
among the musicians of LA and more specifically Laurel Canyon.
As noted
Charles learned to play guitar in prison in a passable manner. He could also write songs. Thus his entrée into the Laurel Canyon crowd
was facilitated. Especially when Manson
and his entourage moved in on Dennis Wilson the drummer for the Beach Boys.
In’66 before
the Hippie influence flooded the markets, the Beach Boys were perhaps the number
one group. In fact their biggest hit
Good Vibrations, Hippie influenced, came in that year, 1966. It was their last big hit. While the name Terry Melcher, might not be
that familiar he was the son of Doris Day and a musician and producer of some
note. He, too, was attracted to the
musical potential of Manson. Thus once
again this allowed Charles to roam Laurel Canyon freely.
Having
cleaned Dennis Wilson out Manson and entourage moved to the Spahn Ranch near
the Simi Valley and Chatsworth. Charles naturally
got involved with drugs, Satanism and biker gangs going by such spine chilling
names as Satan’s Disciples and Hell’s Angels.
(I know, Manson probably had no dealings with the latter group but when
a Californian thought of bikers, he or she thought of the Hell’s Angels and
were terrified.)
As it
happens this was a time when the Negro insurrection or rebellion was in full
flower. For some reason the true nature
of the Negro insurrection has made no impression on the popular mind. Tens of thousands of acres were burned over
perhaps hundreds of lives, maybe thousands, were taken, a whole Negro paramilitary
organization came into existence that was matched by a Federal corps of ‘crime’
fighters. The US unable to come to terms
with the rejection of itself that the rebellion indicates insists that military
actions are merely violations of the law thus wasting tens of millions of
dollars trying these militants in court.
In Marin County the combatants actually burst into the courtroom and
shot it up. This was interpreted as
merely a case of bad manners. You tell
me.
Not only
were billions in real estate burnt in huge conflagrations but actual giant
cities began their disintegration.
Detroit has disappeared from the map in all but name. The Bronx and parts of Brooklyn and Queens
have become virtual deserts of burnt out buildings and decaying
infra-structure. We’re talking combined
areas larger than many countries. For Christ’s
sake Dresden didn’t fare much worse from incendiary saturation bombing and it
was to have no effect on the American mind.
Very few people are even aware of it, even though during the 1977 world
series the flames shown above Yankee stadium.
When asked what the glow was the announcer calmly said: Oh, the Bronx is burning.
Well, it had
an effect on Manson’s mind. He saw the
rebellion for what it was, a Negro revolution, and he envisioned it increasing
rapidly into a full blown open incontrovertible war. He called it Helter Skelter and planned to
retreat into Death Valley until the Negroes would win, as he presumed, at which
point Charlie and his angels would emerge when in his charismatic way he would
take over the Negro society. Might have
worked, who knows?
So, what we
have here is a near perfect storm, sex, drugs, rock and roll, revolution,
whatever was needed.
However
trouble was brewing within the Family, Freudian sexual desires being what they are
and integrity being something to admire from afar.
Key to the
Manson thing, or Sharon Tate murders, is the arch villain movie director Roman
Polanski. Sharon Tate was a hot babe
that Polanski married in a fever but changed his mind when he cooled down. At
that point Tate became unwanted baggage.
Can it be a coincidence that Polanski was out of the country when Tate
was murdered or was it a convenience to dissociate himself from the crime?
All the
victims at the Cielo address have been denounced as vile people who were into
child abuse and pornography as well as other Freudian sexual indulgences such
as sadism etc. These were not innocents. Freud himself was considered by at least one
of his disciples as an arch sadist.
Manson was probably acquainted with all the victims. They were not strangers to him. Tex Watson ran a wig business and probably
knew Jay Sebring who undoubtedly would have recognized Tex. The girls also who were not unfamiliar in
Laurel Canyon may also have been recognizable by the victims.
The
prevailing story is that Mama Cass Elliot ran a party house in the Canyon, an
open door at home place where nearly anyone could wander in.
I suppose I
should give some indication as to how I’m aware of this as I certainly was not
there. One source is the estimable Ed
Sanders study titled The Family. Ed explored
the area in 1970 and is probably as reliable as anyone. Another source is David McGowan’s Weird
Scenes Inside The Canyon. McGowan is
more speculative although exceedingly well informed. He has also written a series of essays on his
website, with pictures, that makes exciting reading. McGowan points the way down astonishing
avenues but has open ended conclusions.
A very
important book dealing with these subterranean doings is Maury Terry’s The
Ultimate Evil: The Truth About The Cult
Murders. Terry is an important source
for the Process Church and the general unrepressed Freudian Satanic unconscious
that characterized the era. And then
there are Bugliosi and Barney Hoskins of course, as well as others.
At any rate
Polanski’s crowd at Cass Elliot’s a few days before the Cielo Drive murders had
felt cheated on a dope deal. They
therefore strung the dealer up by his thumbs and practiced a little Freudian
sadism on his body that might have made the Nazi’s blanch. The fellow deeply resented this treatment and
sought revenge.
Sixty-nine
was not as vile as things were to become but all these dope dealers were very
unsavory characters especially after cocaine became the drug of choice. See the movie Sid And Nancy to get an idea of
their character. So the Canyon crowd
were morally bound to these criminal types while everyone concerned was firing
on all eight cylinders without a muffler, so to speak.
Somebody, we
don’t know who, contacted Manson requiring his services to rectify the dealer’s
humiliation. The question here is what
is right and wrong? What moral universe
were all these people functioning in?
Bear in mind now that by this time it was thought that all morality was
relative, nothing was good or bad, right or wrong, but thinking made it
so. Hence the reasoning outside the
conventional notions of law. You’re only
committing a crime if you think you are although others may have a different
opinion in which case might is right.
The murders
were only wrong if you didn’t understand the logic and were unmoved by Freudian
Satanism.
The
beneficiary of the murders was Roman Polanski who rid himself of an unwanted
wife thereby freeing himself to engage in the child molestation that caused him
to flee the United States to the safety of Europe.
Manson
himself who had undoubtedly explored the mysteries of the legal system in
prison in serious confabulations with other prisoners on concerning how to
avoid arrest was confident that according to legal requirements he was immune to
arrest or, at least, conviction. Quite
simply, he was not present at the murders so legally he could not be convicted
of them.
According to
himself he did not order his angels to murder anyone but somehow they
determined that the murders were the thing to do so in his mind he couldn’t be
convicted of conspiracy to murder. Even
though the murders of both the Tate and La Bianca people left clues that the
Negroes were responsible in an attempt to aggravate the race war, or Helter
Skelter in his term, this could merely be the result of group conversations
from which the Family acted on its own.
Thus,
legally, Charlie had his bases covered.
He had been elsewhere, like Polanski, and guilty of nothing.
As evidence
that Helter Skelter had begun the Family invaded Death Valley actually carving
out a little kingdom of their own. Amazing
story, really. The US was a free country
with minimal supervision. Had the
society been coherent, that is governed by a single set of mores, the whole
situation would have been impossible but with the birth of Satan in 1966 and
the Freudian dissolution of morals anything was possible. And indeed, everything became possible.
While
according to Christianity and the old legal code based on English Common Law
murder had been committed and someone had to pay. Innocent, and he was, or not, Manson had to
pay. This was only because he had
terrified an immoral Hollywood society who recognized their own image in the
Tate-La Bianca murders.
The murders
were only one of numerous horrendous crimes being committed at the time
including the equally horrendous Zodiac murders in San Francisco. Additionally there were two other murder
rings to consider. One was the Weather
Underground and the other was the activities of Jewish zealot Rabbi Meyer
Kahane who founded the JDL, Jewish Defense League. The Jewish Defense League gave birth to an
even more murderous offshoot called the Jewish Defense Organization. Both these groups were off into an insane vision
of reality that boggles the imagination.
The Weather
Underground was the brainchild of the mutant Bomber Billy Ayers and his
sidekick the murderous female Bernadine Dohrn.
In a way similar to Manson Ayers was guiding the destiny of the amazing
flakeouts of the Weathermen. Ayers as
leader was responsible for numerous bombings and several murders. He was involved in the plan to bomb a military
dance. The bomb had it succeeded would
have killed or maimed dozens if not scores of party goers.
The bomb was
filled with shrapnel and nails that would have torn through the swirling
figures on the dance floor. The plan was
aborted when the bomb makers blew themselves up.
Certainly
the crimes and proposed crimes for which Ayers was responsible were as
horrendous if not more so than those for which Manson was convicted. In point of fact, after leading the
authorities on a merry chase Bill the Bomber was apprehended, tried and
convicted quite similarly to Manson.
However he was immediately released on a legal technicality and never
tried again. He was later heard to
chortle: Guilty as hell and free as a
bird. God, what a country. But he was never tried again.
He obtained
his PhD becoming a ‘Distinguished Professor’ at UIllinois and put in charge of
indoctrinating the children of the US.
He lives in ultimate luxury today.
I’m sure
there were enough legal irregularities in Manson’s case to declare his
conviction null and void but that was not to be.
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| Meir Kahane |
The second
case is the equally strange one of Meyer Kahane. He was a Rabbi from New York, therefor of the
privileged caste of Jews who in many ways are set above the law. Like Manson, Kahane too lived his life unto
his own set of mores. Kahane was driven
mad by the events of WWII. Even though
that nasty event was a Jewish-German war the Jews miscalculated the course the
war would take. They were enraged that
Hitler did to them what they were trying to do and actually did succeed in doing
post-war to the Germans.
Thus,
post-war the whole Jewish people essentially went mad. Perceiving Nazis under every US bed, the
country itself overflowing with Hitlers out to get them. They made endless movies about their paranoia. One of the best called Hitler’s Brain is
about the notion that while Hitler died his brain was saved and kept alive
continuing the extermination of the Jews from some undisclosed South American
location. In another movie, The Boys
From Brazil, a number of boys had been cloned, perhaps from cells of Hitler’s
brain in its undisclosed location, and they were growing up to be just like Dad
to finish the job Dad had begun. Good
sci-fi movies actually and these were only two of a number.
Hence Kahane’s
brain rent asunder, leading his paramilitary troops of the JDL, he began a
horrendous bombing and murder campaign.
Apparently everyone knew about it except the FBI. Kahane was never arrested but somebody got
tired of him and offed him or else the Assassination Bureau got him. The point being, although guilty as hell he
was allowed to be free as a bird never being arrested. Like Ayers said: What a country.
Another
interesting situation involves the Process Church and the Son of Sam murders
but it is not exactly pertinent here.
Really what we had in the US was an amoral society, or a developing
one. The rise of Satanism was
remarkable. Suddenly after Rosemary’s
Baby there was an absolute avalanche of Satanic or demonic movies. Younger undeveloped minds were completely
demoralized.
Laws were
regularly passed that enlarged the rights of criminals and made police work
nearly impossible. Understandably they
became frustrated as they watched arch criminals like Bomber Billy Ayers walk
and then admit guilt. Into the seventies
a new type of vigilante movie arose depicting characters like Clint Eastwood’s
Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson’s Death Wish films as Paul Kersey.
The police
were unable to control the criminal element that became emboldened by every law
passed to handcuff the police. The
Silent Majority of Nixon respecting not only the Law but also the idiot laws against
their interests that the criminal enablers passed were unable to defend
themselves, indeed they were forbidden to, so they took refuge in film
fantasies.
Eventually
one. Bernhard Goetz. tired of being abused, armed himself and when four
Negroes, commonly referred to by the media as ‘youths’, who were terrorizing the
subway train he was riding attempted to rob him Goetz shot all four although
none fatally. Although the Liberals were
unable to put him away for assault or attempted murder or whatever after Goetz
escaped them in his first trial he was sentenced to prison in his second trial
for carrying an unregistered pistol. So
much for refusing to be assaulted and robbed by Negroes.
So, society
created the environment that enabled the whole pattern of behavior that permitted
Manson to even think of dreaming the situation he became involved in. Remember, he was only one actor among many in
the situation. Of all the crimes
committed by the various members only he and his angels were punished.
Freudian
sexual fantasies released the girls of Manson’s family to behave in the more
than loose way they did. Rampant drug
use befogged their minds so that they barely knew what they were doing and that
was encouraged by the Satanism nearly created and legitimized by Hollywood
movies, led by Roman Polanski and Rosemary’s Baby. In case folks haven’t realized it yet movies
are not only a sort of entertainment they are open propaganda encouraging the
propaganda of the deed.
 |
| Bomber Billy Ayers |
And then
society only punished arbitrarily certain propagandas of the deed. Bomber Billy Ayers was actually rewarded for
his crimes and is honored in certain circles today. Because the Bomber was released we have the asinine
Barack Obama as president today. If
Ayers had been treated as Manson has and he has surely deserved it, Obama would
have remained an obscure street person.
Meyer Kahane’s crimes far exceed those of Manson and he was tolerated
until a vigilante took matters in hand.
Perhaps
Manson represented a vision of what US citizens were or becoming so that in the
shock of recognition they were so repelled by their own image they would try to
obliterate it. Thus Manson, who had killed
no one was given a death sentence to wipe out that image. Manson would have died for our sins. Unfortunately California abandoned the death
penalty prior to Manson’s date so he has remained to haunt our subconscious all
these decades.
Will his
death be some sort of cathartic? A cause
for great celebration not unlike VE day?
We’ll see, won’t we?
