World says good riddance to counter-culture filth
Iwas in the middle of choking the alligator, continually stopping to rejoin the hose pipe to the engine, all the while muttering to myself how much nature abhors a vacuum . . . cleaner.
Maybe it’s the old hippie in me but I like to hold on to things that are a little past their use-by date – like the vacuum cleaner. It’s so old I’ve been warned by purveyors of vacuum cleaners that the bags are about to be deleted and I should buy up large what little stock they have left.
Said bags are a formidable price and shelling out for packets of them in bulk is not a priority. I have resolved that before I am down to the final bag I will have a stab at fashioning the innards myself.
Other, more modern vacuum cleaners have come and gone, broken down or have been found grossly underpowered in the suction department. Luckily I had kept the old faithful, currently held together with prayers and masking tape, and still lug the brute out of the cupboard to suck up the filth.
A couple of days ago the hose had come loose again, stopping the action long enough for me to hear, from the blare of the radio, that the filth that was Charles Manson had finally quit the coil.
‘‘Good riddance,’’ I shouted, resuming my carpet cleaning with gusto rejoicing that the sad-sack pseudo-Satanist had finally snuffed it. However, I was dismayed to hear that at the ripe old age of 83, the bastard had the audacity to die from natural causes.
If there was any justice, Manson should have incurred a nasty disease and died a long and painful death, or met a murderous end at the hands of some lowlife behind bars.
Had Manson’s fellow inmates fallen prey to his rotten charisma and treated this celebrity sociopath of the sixties with kid gloves? Or did those craziest of eyes and Charlie’s infamous reputation instil jailhouse fear and respect? America, land of the free and home to the dream factory, have we not been assured that your home is no-country-for-oldlags? You’ve badly let us down.
Frankly, I’ll never watch another episode of Prison Break or Oz again. All that was required was one good baddie (with apologies to Shakespeare) to take up arms (with a shiv) against a sea of trouble and by opposing, end him.
A bit of old-fashioned rough justice dished out behind the bars at the Corcoran, California state prison was just what the doctor ordered.
At the time of his death it was said there would probably be no one to claim his body, which seemed only right and proper. But only a day later friends and supporters of Manson reared their ugly heads. A fan club had set up a donations page on GoFundMe to ensure that Manson’s remains ‘‘are laid to rest with the honour, respect and dignity he deserves’’.
The oddly written tribute, which sounded like bad taste satire, went on to say that not only had Manson’s ghoulish fans lost a dear friend and loved one, but two days before Manson’s death, his grandson, one Jason Lee Freeman, had lost his job.
In normal circumstances, the comparison of the loss of a job with a death would be undignified, the finality of the latter far outweighing the temporary employment problem of the former.
However, the heart-rending unemployment details were included so donations could cover Mr Freeman’s legal fees, travel and ‘‘all necessary costs of living’’. And the pay-off for those who donated? They would be ‘‘part of this moment in history of freeing Charles from the same system that did everything in their power to destroy him’’.
The whole thing sounded histrionic and pretentious, as if it were penned by a Victorian chancer high on laudanum. And it may not have been the grandson who was the opportunist at play here, but some garrulous grifter trying to make a quick buck out of the death of the seedy Satanist.
Before his death I would have said there was nothing wrong with Manson – that a good undertaker couldn’t fix. But now that he’s a stiff, his body resting on slab waiting to be claimed and given a decent burial, I feel outraged.
He gave hippies a bad name. Every hard-working, vege-planting, recycling commune dweller, and all those committed to Gaia and the dictums of making love not war, had their lifestyles heavily impugned by the bad odour of Manson.
And that’s a shame because Manson’s outfit was a shabby, run-down con job coat-tailing on counter-culture. Like my old vacuum cleaner, hippiedom had a strong engine and was a movement worth holding on to. If Manson and his ilk hadn’t happened, the world might have been a greener place for just a little bit longer.