And we certainly know, from the unerring rearview mirror of twenty-five years later, that Manson and these murders did not represent a foreboding extension of the direction in which the anti-establishment movement was going.
The sociological implications and legacy, then, of the murders may be no more than that they constituted a reaffirmation of the verity that whenever people surrender their minds and souls to a dictatorial cult figure, there comes a point for the followers when it is too late to turn back, and (as with the masses following the despots of history) whatever direction he goes in, he takes them with him. With the Reverend Moon, for example, it is a life of sleeping on floors and eating mush while he buys more yachts and mansions. With the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh, it was suicide. With Manson, murder.
In searching for a more prosaic explanation for the seemingly timeless resonance of the case, observers have pointed to the fact that Manson and his minions may have murdered as many as thirty-five people, and already had plans to murder celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, and Tom Jones. But apart from the planned celebrity killings, murders by other mass murderers numbering in the twenties and one in the thirties (John Wayne Gacy, thirty-three) have been confirmed. Others have spoken of the brutality of the murders. But though few, there have been murders even more brutal. Still others have pointed to the prominence of the victims—but they weren’t that prominent.
Although all of these elements have undoubtedly contributed to the durability of the case, I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with it at such a late date is that the Manson murder case is almost assuredly the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime. And for whatever reason, people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. If these murders had never happened, and someone wrote a novel with the same set of facts and circumstances, most people would put it down after a few pages; because as I understand it, to be good fiction it has to be somewhat believable, and this story is just too far out.
There is another compelling reason for the continuing fascination with the case. The very name “Manson” has become a metaphor for evil, catapulting him to near mythological proportions. Charles Manson has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity; and again, there is a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil. On a lesser scale, why are there so many popular books and crime shows on television dealing with murder—evil’s ultimate act? (Across the water, one recalls George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Decline of the English Murder,” in which he speaks of the pleasure he and his countrymen receive from reading about a sensational murder in the comfort of their drawing rooms.) Since we place so much value on human life, why do we glorify, in a perverse sort of way, the extinguishment of life? The answer to that question, whatever it is, is at least a partial answer to why people continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Jack the Ripper—Manson.
As with evil, fright also has its allure. The quality of a horror movie, we know, is generally considered to be directly proportionate to the extent to which it terrifies. Manson, of course, delivers on the fright meter like perhaps no one else; his Hitlerian stare fixed upon us from places as diverse as the television screen and the covers of magazines, to the underground albums of his music and his wax frame at Madame Tussaud’s in London. “People worry about this man the way they worry about cancer and earthquakes,” a reporter wrote in 1979. “Just recently”—he quotes a California state prison official—“a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there’s no chance he can escape.” Los Angeles Times columnist Howard Rosenberg calls Manson “America’s preeminent bogeyman.” Not only were the murders he ordered the type one doesn’t even see in horror movies, but Manson, like no other mass murderer of this century, has added a shivering new dimension to the fright quotient—his diabolical and singular talent for getting others, without asking any questions, to kill complete strangers for him at his command. Dr. David Abrahamsen, a noted psychiatrist who has studied the history of violence in America, says he has never heard of any parallel for such a phenomenon. With other prominent mass murderers—from Charles Starkweather, David Berkowitz, Henry Lee Lucas, Charles Whitman, and Richard Speck to Ted Bundy; from Juan Corona, Dean Corll, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez to Jeffrey Dahmer—without exception they committed the murders by themselves or participated with others in the act. The fright generated by these heavyweights of homicide’s rogue gallery, then, was always finite. Because of Manson’s ability to control others and get them to vent his spleen on society for him, the probability of death has always been exponential, and therefore much more frightening.
Some have compared Manson with the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh. Although to their followers, Jones, Koresh, and Manson were all messianic, and each possessed the uncommon ability to totally control and dominate the lives of those who believed in them, the comparison ends there. During the final moments of Jones and Koresh, in a state of dementia they ordered the suicide of their followers, then proceeded to take their own lives also. Turning their power over others inward by ordering and participating in mass suicide is a far cry from Manson driving down dark streets with his followers randomly looking for homes into which he could send them to commit human slaughter. Prior to the last days of Jones and Koresh, there is no evidence that either had ordered others to murder anyone for them. With Manson, murder was his religion, his credo, his way of life. As Paul Watkins said, “Death is Charlie’s trip.”
Derivatively, Manson’s slavishly obedient followers had come to share this hellish passion. Telling cellmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham about the act of murder and the Family’s plan to start traveling throughout the country, killing people and whole families at random, Susan Atkins had said animatedly, “The more you do it, the better you like it.”
If Manson has continued to fascinate mainstream America, he has also done so with its fanatical elements. Today, almost every disaffected and morally twisted group in America, from Satanists to neo-Nazi skinheads, has embraced Manson and the poisons of his virulent philosophy. He has become their spiritual icon, the high priest of anti-establishment hatred. As columnist William Buckley put it, Manson has become “the nation’s leading anti-citizen.” Wayne McGuire, in Aquarian Journal, predicts that “sometime in the future Charles Manson will metamorphose into a major American folk hero.” Though Frenchmen will likely stop drinking wine before that happens,[94] Manson is indeed a hero to many on the jagged margins of our culture. In a 1994 interview, seventeen-year-old +Natalie,[95] a Satanist, says: “Charles Manson is an idol and role model.” The murders happened, she says, because “Manson wanted a new government and anarchy to clear out the garbage, the useless people.” Her twenty-year-old boyfriend, +Robert, a fellow Satanist with whom she lives in San Francisco, adds about the Tate-LaBianca victims: “I feel that might is right, and whoever isn’t prepared to defend their own life shouldn’t cry when their life is taken.” +Willie, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist, says he “got into Manson on the twentieth anniversary of the Tate killings when I went to this heavy metal tribute to him. I had already met all the peace and love cult people and when I ran into the Satan types I liked all the negative aspects they stood for. So ever since, I’ve been hanging out with people that support Manson.” Willie feels that as a white man he is the victim of racism in our society, that blacks are “like Neanderthals and overpopulating our culture.” If Manson got out, “he would improve the quality of life.” +Alex, a forty-two-year-old neo-Nazi who has corresponded with Manson for years, says his “discovery” of Manson can only be compared to his earlier discovery of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. He calls Manson “the foremost revolutionary leader in the world today,” and is special “by virtue of a one in a hundred million shot of gene combinations that gives him his ideas, personality, and physical presence.”
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However, the Manson T-shirts and Guns N’ Roses’ album show that the attempted apotheosis and romanticizing of Manson is under way. Two screen projects in the works (the British television documentary