{"id":1079,"date":"2017-11-21T00:50:36","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T08:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=1079"},"modified":"2017-11-21T00:50:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T08:50:36","slug":"goodbye-charlie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2017\/11\/21\/goodbye-charlie\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Charlie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Charles Milles Manson, predator, dark messiah, and unlikely internet folk hero, has died at the age of 83, nearly half a century after the crimes that made him infamous.<\/p>\n

Manson was born in November 1934, to a teenage mother named Ada Kathleen Maddox. \u201cManson\u201d comes from the stepfather who obligingly married his mother before he was born, and then bowed out of their lives not long after, leaving only his name behind. The baby\u2019s extended family were comfortable working\/middle class, devoutly fundamentalist, and mostly respectable\u2014even his mother, after a disastrous flirtation with booze, crime, and prison, turned her life around.<\/p>\n

The usual inclination at this point is to look for childhood traumas and abuse that \"\"<\/a>might explain how a monster became a monster, but I\u2019m not sure we need to look that far. In the description of biographer Jeff Guinn<\/a>, based on interviews and school records, Manson in childhood comes across as a classic Bad Seed<\/a>, an infant sociopath with a violent and predatory streak, sly, thieving, and incorrigible. As he grew, habitual lying and theft gave way to petty criminality\u2014boarding schools for troubled youths gave way to reformatories, and then jail by the age of 22.<\/p>\n

Manson was not stupid, with a prison-tested IQ of 121, but he had come out of elementary school and the reformatories barely able to read. \u00a0\u00a0Prison, in a curious way, broadened his horizons. He took courses. He was tutored in the steel guitar by the 1930s gangster Alvin Karpis. He began writing songs. And he began to gather the disparate strands that would eventually come together in his message for the world\u2014or at least for a couple of dozen flower children in Haight-Ashbury\u2019s Summer of Love.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The foundation was already there, in the apocalyptic fundamentalist Christianity in which he had been raised, notably the trippier portions of the Book of Revelation. In jail, he devoured the Dale Carnegie course on how to influence (manipulate) people. He flirted with Scientology, both the mainstream version and an apocalyptic splinter group calling itself \u201dThe Process Church of The Final Judgment,\u201d or \u201cThe Process,\u201d which equated Jesus with Satan, and looked forward to the end of the world in ways that paralleled Manson\u2019s own special end-times scenario. He learned the tricks of pimping, from experts. His prison reports speak of strong antisocial tendencies and a powerful need to draw attention to himself, both being common narcissistic, messianic markers.<\/p>\n

Manson was released in the spring of 1967 and moved to San Francisco, where\u2014in the Summer of Love\u2014he began collecting a worshipful circle of young middle-class runaways and dropouts, mostly female, expanding to a harem of as many as eighteen young women plus a few young men.\u00a0 He was not just their leader, but their guru\u2014a charismatic philosopher-musician, an expounder of counterculture wisdom with a dash of the Bible and scientology.\u00a0 Soon, he was their god as well as their guru.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1968 the Family moved to Los Angeles, since Manson keenly wanted to develop a career as a musician.\u00a0 He and the Family freeloaded off Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys for a few months, apparently costing Wilson something like $100,000 during their sojourn in his house. When Wilson finally evicted them, the guru moved the Family into the nearby desert to live communally on a series of rundown ranches.\u00a0 In the meantime, he made a few demo tapes of his music with the help of Dennis Wilson and his brother Brian, and even sold a song<\/a> to the Beach Boys, a version of which later appeared on one of their albums, credited to Dennis.<\/p>\n

Accounts of their squalid life in the desert confirm that the Family fits the definition of a cult: the retreat to the wilderness, Manson\u2019s sexual control of multiple females and complete alpha-male dominance over the few males, the willingness of the disciples to buy into Manson\u2019s philosophy, and\u2014even more\u2014their willingness to carry out antisocial acts against outsiders to further his agenda, including\u00a0 shoplifting, drug-dealing, whoring, torture, and eventually murder.<\/p>\n

As to the last, the events of August 1969 are well known.\u00a0 Manson sent out Family\"\"<\/a> members, both male and female, with instructions to kill everyone they found at two upscale addresses, which included Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski.\u00a0 Later, they were linked with at least one previous killing, the torture-murder of drug dealer Gary Hinman, whom Manson claimed owed money to the Family over a bad drug deal.\u00a0 Rumours persist that other bodies are still buried out at the ranch, though attempts in early 2008 to find evidence of human remains came to nothing.\u00a0 The relevant question here is not how many were killed, but why<\/em><\/strong> Manson sent his people out on these murder missions.<\/p>\n

One reason lies in Manson\u2019s personality.\u00a0 Though he denied it later, he was hungry to make it on the music scene, and bitter that success was not forthcoming.\u00a0 The frustration of finding doors closed to him seems to have morphed into general resentment of a world that was not appreciating him enough, plus a music industry that was shutting him out.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Polanski home was chosen because it had previously been rented to Terry Melcher and his girlfriend, Candice Bergen.\u00a0 Melcher, the musician son of Doris Day, was also a record producer with the Beach Boys, and Manson had auditioned for him; but Melcher, like Brian Wilson, was creeped out by Manson, and cut all ties.\u00a0 Manson clearly bore a grudge for this, and was later to claim that he knew Melcher had moved, and was sending him a message with the killings at his old address.\u00a0 Similarly the LaBianca home, where the second murder mission took place, was next door to another music contact who was shutting Manson out. Manson\u2019s personal vengeance was part of the agenda\u2014but only part of it.<\/p>\n

The Family was a textbook example of an apocalyptic cult on a miniature scale. Manson taught that the world was about to erupt into a devastating race war, during which the blacks would exterminate the whites\u2014though in some versions it was the other way around.\u00a0 Manson and his Family would ride out the storm in a deep cave in Death Valley, the \u201cbottomless pit\u201d of Revelation, where the walls glowed and milk and honey flowed; and when the slaughter was over, they would emerge and take over the running of the world from the incompetent blacks.\u00a0 Thus Charlie would come into his own as the reincarnation of Jesus, and the new global messiah.<\/p>\n

This scenario came partly from the Book of Revelation, coloured by Scientology and the Process, but there was more.\u00a0 Manson had found the critical revelation, the new scripture, the true message from the universe, in the lyrics of the Beatles\u2019 White Album, which he saw as a direct communication from the prophets\u2014aka the Beatles\u2014to himself, as the reincarnation of both Jesus and Satan.\u00a0 With this in mind, he \"\"<\/a>cunningly deciphered the Beatles lyrics in the light of the Book of Revelation, and lo! the end of the world was nigh.<\/p>\n

According to Manson, the end-times events would kick off with Helter Skelter, the name Manson gave to the coming race war, written in paint at the ranch and in the victims\u2019 blood at the two crime scenes.\u00a0 But why order the murders?\u00a0 Because Manson was in a hurry for Helter Skelter to start.\u00a0 Part of his urgency to become a rock star was his belief that his first album, rocketing to the top of the charts, would be a chief catalyst for the race war. Thus, when people like Melcher failed to bring out that album and make him a star, they were not just frustrating his personal narcissistic ambition\u2014for which they should die\u2014but they were also wickedly delaying the apocalypse and falsifying his prophecy\u2014for which they should die. And since it seemed his recording career was on hold, he had to find another way of jump-starting Armageddon, hence the false-flag murders of rich white victims.<\/p>\n

Within a few months of the murders, the Family\u2019s careless trail of petty crimes and loose talk \u00a0led investigators to the desert ranches where the Family was still searching for the entrance to the \u201cbottomless pit.\u201d\u00a0 Some of them were arrested, and the investigators found a hefty stash of weapons, plus (it is said) a Scientology e-meter.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Few of the Family members lost faith when their messiah was arrested.\u00a0 Instead, they reacted in typical cultish fashion by increasing <\/em><\/strong>their devotion.\u00a0 Those charged along with Manson were unrepentant and defiant.\u00a0 Those released without being charged fascinated the world with their antics in and out of the courthouse, disrupting the proceedings, shaving their heads when Charlie did, and refusing to testify against him. Several of those directly involved in the murders are still in prison; and in 1975, Family member Lynette Fromme went to prison for life by making an attempt on President Ford in defence of the redwoods, though she made no serious attempt to fire her gun.\u00a0 Manson, throughout his decades in prison, remained as messianically articulate, self-justifying, charismatic and scary<\/em> as ever.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Moreover, he had fans.\u00a0 The net is full of sites hailing him as a hero of the counterculture; he put out a digital album in 2005 with the not inappropriate title One Mind<\/em>. Through willing fans, he had a personal website<\/a> and a non-profit organization called ATWA (Air Trees Water Animals)<\/a>. I predict that somewhere in the lunatic fringe of the internet, someone will soon be claiming that Charlie will rise again.<\/p>\n

I think the evidence is strong that Manson was simply born bad<\/em><\/strong>\u2014that is, born without a conscience or the capacity for empathy. I think, too, that a good many of us are born to be fooled<\/em><\/strong>\u2014that is, born with a vulnerability to conscienceless charismatic con artists like Manson, panting to be manipulated. And I also<\/em> think that Manson\u2019s creepy little cult, led by a psychopath and staffed by willing slaves, is a pretty good microcosm of many much larger movements, both secular and religious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Milles Manson, predator, dark messiah, and unlikely internet folk hero, has died at the age of 83, nearly half…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}