White Trash on Drugs, American Christians Love Affair with Christian Cults
Emma Romano
To:boxcarro@yahoo.com Mon., Jun. 14 at 7:23 a.m. Hi there Boxcarro, I saw your
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White Trash on Drugs, American Christians Love Affair with @Real
@Christians like West Virginia Pentecostal Holiness Snake Handler
Ordained Pastor Charles Manson.
AP Photo, File
A man of many narratives.
THE STORY OF A MURDERER
All the ways we’ve tried to fit Charles Manson into a
convenient narrative
Investigative reporter Satan. Sociopath. Psychopath.
Narcissist. Eco-warrior. Opportunist. Manipulator. White
supremacist. Misogynist. Executioner of hippie culture.
Embodiment of evil. These are just some of the ways
Charles Manson, the notorious 1960s killer and cult
leader, has been described in the countless obituaries
published since his death at 83 on Nov. 19.
Manson died unrepentant and incorrigible, and his passing
will likely intensify America’s decades-long fascination
with its most famous mass killing. But while the Manson
murders have many irresistible elements—drugs, sex,
celebrity, brainwashing—a big part of Manson’s undying
legacy is the versatility of his own story. He is
whatever you want him to be; he defies many narratives,
and yet fits so many. In fact, no one put it better than
the man himself (with a healthy dose of his signature
manipulation): ”I am just a mirror,” Manson said
several times in a 1970 interview
with Rolling Stone. “Anything you see in me is you.”
Evil or human?
“The name Manson has become a metaphor for evil, and
there’s a side of human nature that’s fascinated by pure
unalloyed evil,” Vincent Bugliosi once said. Bugliosi, the
prosecutor on Manson’s case, authored the definitive
account of the murders, 1974’s Helter Skelter.
The Associated Press obituary of Manson
features the word “evil” three times, including one
description of Manson’s image as the “personification of
evil.” Linda Kasabian, one of Manson’s disciples and the
prosecution’s star witness, also famously called Manson
“the devil” in her testimony. Understandable, considering
he managed to conjure a murderous frenzy in his
followers that left an 8.5-month pregnant woman dead of 16
stab wounds.
Others see Manson as more of a product of his
circumstances: a tragic childhood, a neglectful teen
mother, relatives who tortured him, and a
juvenile-detention system that spat him out abused.
“Manson, though, was no devil but a human being, as his
death makes clear,” David A. Ulin writes at The Los Angeles Times. ”I don’t say that to soften or absolve him. But I
don’t believe in demons; people are frightening enough.
Indeed, to accept Manson as a person, to see him through
the filter of his humanity, is to acknowledge what we
resist: that he was perhaps not so utterly different from
the rest of us.”
A product of a culture—and its executioner
Personal biography aside, Manson is also widely seen as a
product of his era. He wore his hair long, was obsessed
with The Beatles, and hung out with one of the Beach Boys.
Manson’s disciples were drifters who started a commune,
where drugs flowed freely and sex was unconstrained. “For
many, the Manson episode validated their fears of the
counterculture movement,”
writes David Smith, a physician who treated the Manson family, in the
Washington Post. Smith says San Francisco’s “Summer of
Love” and embrace of drugs wrought Manson.
But Manson also took advantage of that culture, perverting
it to suit his ideas—perhaps this is why he’s also
credited with killing the era he came out of. As Joan
Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album,” no one was
surprised after hearing the news of the murders. “The
tension broke that day,” she wrote. “The paranoia was
fulfilled.”
Eco-warrior and white supremacist
Manson obits from both sides of the political spectrum
proffered still more narratives—that of a leftwing
nut job, and that of a white supremacist. Infowars
reminded
the world that Manson “embraced environmentalism as a
justification for his insane actions” and claimed that his
preachings about annihilating humanity for the sake of the
natural world have been “adopted by the far-left.” (It’s
true that Manson spoke about his climate change beliefs
several times. In 2011, he even gave an interview to the Spanish edition of Vanity Fair, in which he
warned of melting polar caps.)
Breitbart devoted a whole section
of its obituary
to Manson’s connection with militant leftist group The
Weather Underground, and Geraldo Rivera, who conducted an
“epic” (his word) interview with Manson in 1988,
wrote that
Manson was “more popular than Che or Mao….a charismatic
snake charmer, an articulate, eco-friendly homicidal
maniac who was part Jim Jones and part Adolf Hitler.”
Meanwhile, multiple mainstream, left-leaning or
minority-focused
publications zeroed in on another, opposing interpretation
of Manson’s politics: He was a
white supremacist
who wanted to wage a race war.
“Mr. Manson was not the end point of the
counterculture,” Baynard Woods
writes at The New York Times (paywall). “If anything, he was a backlash against
the civil rights movement and a harbinger of white
supremacist race warriors like Dylann Roof, the lunatic
fringe of the alt-right.”
These narratives often seem to be mutually exclusive, but
Manson is a universal villain: Suggestions that Manson was
embraced by some members of the counterculture
are not without merit, nor are assertions that he used race to sow
conflict.
America’s patient and entertainer
Described as everything from “wild-eyed” to demonic,
Manson seems to demand psychological diagnosis. After
all, a “crazy” murderer is more comforting than one
who is a rational actor, opportunist, and master
manipulator. (Or, as Vox put it, “an average narcissist who practiced social engineering
and learned to use the bodies of willing women around him
as a bargaining tool.”) In this way, Manson helped
usher in an era of fascination with true crime and serial
killers, psychoanalysis of whom still provides endless entertainment.
In 2012, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak even suggested
that Manson’s entertainment value could be seen as a
redeeming quality. “The world would have been a better
place without Manson,” he wrote, “but since he had to exist, his roles as the nutjob to
end all nutjobs can be read as something like
compensation.” Juzwiak called Manson a “very contemporary
celebrity.”
Indeed, our continuing fascination with Manson, whose list
of victims is much shorter than most mass killers today,
is perhaps most enabled by our cultural obsession with
celebrity. “Reality TV and general cultural narcissism
have conditioned us to appreciate characters (especially
villains) and, man, is that guy a character,” Juzwiak
wrote. Or as Manson himself said: “You’re creating a
legend, you’re creating a beast, you’re creating whatever
you are judging yourselves with into the word Manson.”
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