‘ You can already see hints of Manson being treated as a harmless cartoon.’
HE’S A ’60s RELIC. SOMEONE THE BABY BOOMERS REMEMBER.
So Charles Manson is dead at l ast. If this were a tabloid newspaper, I would be obligated to find another way to say that: “Charles Manson: Now Riding The Express Elevator To Hell!” Some editors seem to feel a strong need to emphasize that Manson was actually a bad person who built a terroristic personal cult and arranged some of the most nauseating murders in American history.
And, of course, looking at other headlines, it is not hard to see why. The world is full of editors too young to have any real idea who Charles Manson was — who only know of him as an aged prison inmate, someone of vague entertainment-related celebrity, ranting incoherently at the camera on newsmagazine shows. He’s a ’ 60s relic. Someone the baby boomers remember for some reason.
In this, you can see the world coming full circle in an odd sort of way. When Manson was on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 1969, the alternative and underground media of the time depicted him alternately as a free- love hippie Jesus and an anti- establishment avenger. Radicals cannot help loving somebody who really walks the walk, and Manson, in the eyes of some, had displayed the courage to really “off the pigs,” renounce material possessions, and wage class war. (Hell, 50 people on Twitter are probably promulgating this view of Manson even as I write this.)
From that cold- blooded standpoint, one supposes the “pigs” might reasonably include Sharon Tate and her wealthy houseguests, and they might even include the LaBiancas, who had just sold off a family- owned supermarket chain. It is a little harder to see how Steve Parent, the teenaged electronics nerd who had visited the caretaker at the Tate place and was slaughtered trying to drive away, might fit into the scheme. Parent became — perhaps inevitably, given the Hollywood background of the killings — an easily misplaced detail.
Even t he more mainstream press took a sort of half- admiring view of Manson, portraying him as uniquely diabolical and mesmerizing. In June 1970, Rolling Stone magazine put Manson on the cover, promising readers “The incredible story of the most dangerous man alive.” In the illustration, he looks more beatific than dangerous. ( This depiction, needless to say, came about before Manson hacked a swastika into his own forehead.) When Rolling Stone does this sort of thing nowadays, people get properly angry. Filthy, murderous, babbling drifters with a messianic streak have remained firmly out of fashion since Manson finally polished them off.
The Manson- as- Satanic-force theme served the purposes of the prosecution, who convicted him on the (irrefutable) theory that he enjoyed marionette-like control over his “Family” members. From a historic distance, after decades of Manson “interviews” full of nonsense and confusion, it is less persuasive. Maybe it is easier, in a world where city streets swarm with the deinstitutionalized insane, to identify Manson’s bad-jazz glossolalia for what it is.
Manson spent the overwhelming majority of his adult life, before and after the killings, in prison: his destiny at any other time in American history would have been to stay locked up for good, in one bin or another. But for a brief moment during the Summer of Love, Manson, with his hacky songs and his apocalyptic, proto- environmentalist rap, looked like the future.
He came alarmingly close to getting a serious record contract, and there may be an alternate universe in which Manson ended up as an obscure, eccentric songwriter. If this is true, it raises the weird possibility that there are obscure, eccentric songwriters who might have ended up as Charles Manson, given the same cruel upbringing and strange chance influences. Manson, for instance, was taught to play guitar by a fellow inmate in a federal prison in Washington state — the legendary gangster Alvin “Creepy” Karpis.
Even as I write that, I notice that “legendary gangster” is a witless euphemism for “murdering sociopath,” just as surely as Manson epithets like “hippie cult leader” are. Creepy Karpis is as remote in history for me as Manson is for some of you.
A century from now, nobody will be able to meaningfully sympathize with the terror Charles Manson inspired in the decent bourgeoisie of the United States — the crawling universal fear, expressed in popular culture for years, of every long- haired, shabby punk who looked sideways at you from across the street. You can already see the hints of Manson being treated as a harmless cartoon, in much the way old-time pirates are by Hollywood now. Outsider art and comedy already treat him this way openly, and he has “fans.”
He is, whether or not he deserves to have been, an important figure in American history. And in the end, as grotesque a truth as it is, he is probably destined to become a mere piece of allusive colour in the future’s uncomprehending costume dramas.