Death Trip

by Johnny Satan

  Both subsequently have reported much of the news related to the case, and Cohen has been assigned to cover Charlie’s trial.

  According to a freelance Life contributor in the area and since confirmed by several Times staffers, Miss Atkins’ attorneys gave Schiller tapes of her confession on the condition that he sellthe story to foreign papers only and split the money. But Schiller is a promoter, not a writer, and he needed someone to put the thing together fast. His first stop was The Los Angeles Times where he found Cohen to be a friend indeed.

  After conferences with Cohen and various Times editors, it was decided Cohen and Torgerson would write a story and a book, both under Schiller’s name. In return, New American would have exclusive rights to the book and the Times would publish the confession simultaneously with the foreign press.

  All this was to be top secret, of course. But Schiller got careless. Not only did he awkwardly appear in the Times city room to see his freshly printed byline, he invited people like our Life correspondent over to his house the week before while Cohen was in the next room hacking away.

  What possible justification could the Times editors have had in running the confessions? Where were their heads? Can an individual’s right to a fair trial, free of damaging pretrial publicity, be so relative? Can it be compromised so easily by the fictitious right of the public to be entertained?

  The Times would argue that Susan Atkins’ testimony to the County Grand Jury, later made public, had essentially the same impact as her confession. If so, why did the Times print both?

  Besides, there surely are many readers who trust in the Times who rightfully suspect the Grand Jury, realizing it consists mainly of retired old men and white, upper-middle-class housewives hand-picked by the District Attorney.

  If Miss Atkins’ confession does not constitute damaging pretrial publicity, what does? What does the phrase mean?

  Clearly Charles Manson already stands as the villain of our time, the symbol of animalism and evil. Lee Harvey Oswald? Sirhan Sirhan? Adolph Eichman? Misguided souls, sure, but as far as we know they never took LSD or fucked more than one woman at a time.

  Manson is already so hated by the public that all attempts so far to exploit his reputation have failed miserably. Of the 2,000 albums of his music that were pressed, less than 300 have sold.

  A skin flick based weakly on popular assumptions about Manson and his Family, Love In The Commune, closed after two days in San Francisco, only mustered two old men on a Saturday night in Los Angeles. Normally, one wouldn’t expect skin flick buffs to be that discriminating, although certainly the few scenes in the film of a Manson-type balling a headless chicken probably had little mass prurient appeal.

  Even Cohen and Torgerson’s book is reportedly in financial trouble, although profits to the Times-Mirror Syndicate from sales to other American papers have already been counted.

  Are there 12 people in the country, let alone Los Angeles, who can honestly say they have no opinions about Charles Manson?

  Mention of his name in polite conversation provokes, not words or heated argument, but noises, guttural sound effects, gasps, shrieks, violent physical gestures of repulsion. He is more than a villain, he is a leper.

  Shortly after Manson’s arrest, the musician’s local in Los Angeles wrote the Times and said flatly that he had checked his union’s records and that Manson definitely was not a musician. So there’d be no confusion, he added that most musicians were good clean fellows who believe in hard work and the American way of life.

  But all this is really beside the point. Even if the Times could somehow prove that its confession did Manson absolutely no harm, what right did they have to take the risk? The moral decision must be made before, not after, the fact if a man’s right to an impartial trial is to be taken seriously.

  On the other hand, the most blatant – if less damaging – assault on the concept of pretrial impartiality comes not from the Establishment or the Far Right, but the Far Left, the Weathermen faction of the SDS.

  According to an item from the Liberation News Service, the Weathermen have made Manson a revolutionary hero on the assumption that he is guilty. Praising him for having offed some “rich honky pigs,” they offer us a prize example of bumper sticker mentality:

  “MANSON POWER – THE YEAR OF THE FORK!”

  The underground press in general has assumed kind of a paranoid-schizo attitude towards Manson, undoubtably hypersensitive to the relentless gloating of the cops who, after a five-year search, finally found a longhaired devil you could love to hate.

  Starting in mid-January, the Los Angeles Free Press banner headlined Manson stories for three weeks in a row:

  “MANSON CAN GO FREE!”

  “M.D. ON MANSON’S SEX LIFE!”

  “MANSON INTERVIEW! EXCLUSIVE! EXCLUSIVE!”

  The interview, by the way, ran for two more weeks, consisted mainly of attorney/author Michael Hannon talking to himself. Later, the Free Press began a weekly column by Manson written from jail.

  About the same time, a rival underground paper, Tuesday’s Child, ran Manson’s picture across the entire front page with the headline “MAN OF THE YEAR: CHARLES MANSON.” In case you missed the point, in their next issue they covered the front page with a cartoon of Manson on the cross. The plaque nailed above his head read simply “HIPPIE.”

  When the Manson record was released, both papers agreed to run free ads for it, but the chain of Free Press bookstores, owned by Free Press publisher Art Kunkin, refused to sell it, arguing it was an attempt to make profit of tragedy.

  Of course, not all the stories in the Free Press and Tuesday’s Child were pro-Manson. Some were very lukewarm, others were simply anti-cop. The question that seemed to split underground editorial minds more than any other was simply: Is Manson a hippie or isn’t he?

  It’s hard to imagine a better setting for Manson’s vision of the Apocalypse, his black revolution, than Los Angeles, a city so large and cumbersome it defies the common senses, defies the absurd.

  For thousands of amateur prophets it provides a virtual Easter Egg hunt of spooky truths.

  Its climate and latitude are identical to Jerusalem. It easily leads the country in our race toward ecological doom. It has no sense of the past; the San Andreas Fault separates it from the rest of the continent by a million years.

  If Manson’s racial views seem incredibly naive, which they are (after preaching against the Black Panthers for two years, he recently asked who Huey Newton was), they are similar to views held by hundreds of thousands of others in that city and that city’s mayor.

  Citizens there last year returned to office Mayor Sam Yorty whose administration was riddled with conflicts of interest and bribery convictions, rather than elect a thoughtful, soft-spoken, middle-of-the-road ex-cop who happened to be black. Full-page newspaper ads, sponsored by a police organization, pictured the man as a wild African savage and asked voters, “Will Your Home be Safe with Bradley as Mayor?”

  The question to ask, therefore, maybe not now but five or ten years from now, is this: Who would the voters prefer, Bradley or Manson? Would Your Home be Safe with Manson as Mayor?

  “I am just a mirror,” Manson says over and over. “Anything you see in me is in you.” He says it so often it becomes an evasive action. I’m rubber and you’re glue. But there’s a truth there nonetheless.

  The society may be disgusted and horrified by Charles Manson, but it is the society’s perverted system of penal “rehabilitation,” its lusts for vengeance and cruelty, that created him.

  The Spahn Movie Ranch may seem a miserable place for kids to live, with its filthy, broken-down shacks anmd stagnant streams filled daily with shoveled horse shit. Life there may seem degenerate, a dozen or more people eating garbage, sleeping, balling and raising babies in a 20-foot trailer.

  But for more than two years most of those kids have preferred that way of life – life with Charlie than living in the homes of their parents.

  The press
likes to put the Manson Family in quotation marks – “family.” But it’s a real family, with real feelings of devotion, loyalty and disappointment. For Manson and all the others it’s the only family they’ve ever had.

  One is tempted to say that Manson spent 22 of his 35 years in prison, that he is more a product of the penal system than the Haight-Ashbury.

  But it cannot be dismissed that easily. Charles Manson raises some very serious questions about our culture, whether he is entirely part of it or not.

  For actually we are not yet a culture at all, but a sort of pre-culture, a gathering of dis-enchanted seekers, an ovum unfertilized.

  There is no new morality, as Time and Life would have us believe, but a growing awareness that the old morality has not been praticed for some time.

  The right to smoke dope, to pursue different goals, to be free of social and economic oppression, the right to live in peace and equity with our brothers – this is Founding Fathers stuff.

  In the meantime we must suffer the void, waiting for the subversives in power to die, waiting for the old, dead, amoral culture to be buried. For many, particularly the young among us, the wait, the weight, is extremely frustrating, even unbearable. Life becomes absurd beyond enjoyment. Real doubts grow daily whether any of the tools we have to change power work anymore. There are no answers and the questions lose their flavor.

  Into this void, this seemingly endless river of shit, on top of it, if you will, rode Charlie Manson in the fall of 1967, full of charm and truth and gentle goodness, like Robert Mitchum’s psychopathic preacher in Night of the Hunter with LOVE and HATE inscribed on opposing hands. (A friend of Manson’s said recently, “You could almost see the devil and angel in him fighting it out, and I guess the devil finally won.”)

  This smiling, dancing music man offered a refreshing short cut, a genuine and revolutionary new morality that redefines or rather eliminates the historic boundaries between life and death.

  Behind Manson’s attitude toward death is the ancient mystical belief that we are all part of one body – an integral tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity as expressed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians: “For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”

  But Manson adds a new twist; he wants us to take the idea literally, temporarily. He believes that he – and all human beings – are God and the Devil at the same time, that all human beings are part of each other, that human life has no individual value. If you kill a human being, you’re just killing part of yourself; it has no meaning.

  “Death is psychosomatic,” says Manson.

  Thus the foundation of all historic moral concepts is neatly discarded. Manson’s is a morality of amorality. “If God is One, what is bad?” he asks. Manson represents a frightening new phenomenon, the acid-ripped street fighter, erasing the barrier between the two outlaw cultures – the head and the hood – described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test:

  “The Angels were too freaking real. Outlaws? They were outlaws by choice, from the word go, all the way out in Edge City. Further! The hip world, the vast majority of acid heads, were stil playing the eternal charade of the middle-class intellectuals – Behold my wings! Freedom! Flight! – but you don’t actually expect me to jump off that cliff, do you? ”

  Perhaps it was inevitable for someone like Manson to come along who would jump off that cliff; that a number of lost children seem willing to believe him is indeed a disturbing sign of the times.

  “Little children,” wrote St. John in a prophetic letter, “it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrists shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know it is the last time.”

  CHAPTER 2.

  Should the killer think: ‘I kill’,

  Or the killed: ‘I have been killed’,

  Both these have no [right] knowledge:

  He does not kill nor is he killed.

  –The Katha Upanishad (2.19)

  Charlie Manson draws his own conclusions: ‘There is no good, there is no evil ... You can’t kill kill’ and ‘If you’re willing to be killed, you should be willing to kill.’ According to his disciples, Charlie had transcended all desire: Charlie, then, was dead. ‘It wasn’t Charlie any more. It was the Soul. They were all Charlie and Charlie was they.’

  It is, perhaps, not easy to sympathize with a man who was responsible for and convicted of nine brutal and sadistic murders and who was almost certainly responsible for many more. It is, however, very possible to be fascinated by him, for Charlie Manson is the symbol of a deep malaise in American society. In his own slight person he represented American youth’s present revulsion against what Dr Leary has called the ‘Protestant work ethic’ which has become indistinguishable from the worship of Mammon, that is, the worship of money, the desire to have more and more, above all more than your neighbor, for that means ‘status’.

  A form of protest that infected American youth and which we might call ‘mindless', is typified by what the Americans call ‘bikers' (motorcycle gangs), the most harmless of which do little more than worship the idol machine created by other men's brains and hands, while the more noxious varieties, though mindless, are infected at third hand by the pseudo oriental ideas of the likes of Aleister Crowley. Two of them revel in those sinister initials SS (the Nazi élite corps committed heart and soul to Crowley's political avatar, Adolf Hitler). For the one group the mystic letters stood for ‘Satan Slaves', for the other for ‘Straight Satans'. Both groups interested Charlie Manson who saw in them a possible military wing to further the ends of his Family.

  Charles Manson is, perhaps, unique in that, in his bizarre way, he combines the seeming opposites of the drop out hippies with the incoherent New Left. The victim of a rotten society, he collected a band of devoted disciples, withdrew into the desert, moulded his followers according to his will, and then descended once again into the unholy city of Los Angeles to strike terror in the fattened hearts of the overfed.

  Charles Manson is, perhaps, unique in that, in his bizarre way, he combines the seeming opposites of the drop out hippies with the incoherent New Left. The victim of a rotten society, he collected a band of devoted disciples, withdrew into the desert, moulded his followers according to his will, and then descended once again into the unholy city of Los Angeles to strike terror in the fattened hearts of the overfed.

  Unlike Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson did not have the advantage of being educated at those eminently bourgeois institutions, Tonbridge School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was born ‘underprivileged’, as our nauseating, pharisaical modern jargon puts it. In other words he was destitute, despised and rejected. Son of a teenage prostitute and a casual client known only by his pseudonym as ‘Colonel Scott’, he was from the start a being without a name – a being without personal identity, that is, for it is the name that identifies you as you as distinct from all other beings.

  There is something highly symbolical in this as there is in everything about this extraordinary man. To be without a name means to be outside and beyond all that can be named.

  The Way that can be told is not an Unvarying Way; The names that can be named are not unvarying names. It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang; The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.

  These are the opening words of the famous Taoist classic, the Tao T? Ching – mysterious words from a book as mysterious and as ambiguous as the character of Charles Manson himself. But though the Nameless may be the source of all that is, it is not good for a man to be without a name; and so this nameless boy, born of a teenage whore and a shadowy father whose name he never knew, received the name of Manson, a man his mother is believed to have married for a brief time to give him a semblance of legitimacy. And so the nameless received a name – Manson – the Son of Man. Did he consciously realize that this was the name that Another chose for himself, and was this th
e reason why he came to regard himself as Jesus Christ? We are not told. Sometimes the name seemed to fit and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes he was the Son of Man, and sometimes he did not know who he was, the ‘nameless’ of which nothing positive can be said. Given these ambiguities, it should not be difficult to understand that he was speaking the truth when he said at his trial (or so it was reported at the time): ‘I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed. I don’t place myself in the seat of judgement. I may have implied on several occasions that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet who I am or what I am.

  I was given a name and a number and I was put in a cell, and I have lived in a cell with a name and a number.

  ‘I don’t know who I am.

  ‘I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are.’

  There is a real dignity and pathos in these words. Charles Manson knew his Bible and was inspired by it. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’, he must have remembered – remembered too that it was only at his trial that Jesus publicly confessed that he was ‘the son of the Blessed One’, for after Peter had acknowledged him as Christ he had given strict orders to his disciples that they should tell no-one what they now knew. Again, had not Christ himself been accused by the Pharisees, the religious establishment of the time, of casting out devils through the prince of devils? And was it not because they wanted him to be Satan that they accused him of working through Satan?

  Again Charles Manson said: ‘You want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are.’ Was he pondering those scathing words of Jesus to those who rejected him:

  The devil is your father,

  and you prefer to do

  what your father wants.

  He was a murderer from the start;

  he was never grounded in the truth;