From the London Times obituary for the rock journalist David Dalton, who has died at the age of 80.
Heres the award winning article he wrote in 1970: "Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive/A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself."
Sample text:
“I am just a mirror,” Manson says over and over. “Anything you see in me is 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 and stagnant streams filled daily with shoveled horse shit. [L]ife 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....
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 disenchanted 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 practiced 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 younger 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....
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.”
२३ टिप्पण्या:
Remind me, was Manson the guy who organized a mass killing?
I think it was Brian's brother Dennis (the Beach Boys' drummer) who was enamored with Manson, not Brian. They did record one of Manson's songs and included it on one of their albums, (with the lyrics and/or title slightly changed, if I'm remembering correctly).
Well, I guess we can do without him.
Brian was enamoured of Charlie? Just the other day I was flipping through my music files and came upon Charlie's demo "Look at Your Game Girl" - kinda' early Van Morrison by way of Donovan. Obviously a stripped down demo devoid of professional production values but still Charlie was not without talent. I guess acid and "Helter Skelter" got in the way. I wonder if Charlie ever found out that a helter skelter is Liverpudlian slang for a playground slide...
I was a surgery resident at LA County when one of the Manson girls had an appendectomy. Thank god I wasn't involved. A doctor friend lived next door to the LaBiancas. They were not home that night. I read "Helter Skelter" and then hid it from my kids. My lawyer older son assures me they all read it. I'm sure he did. The others were too small.
Charles Manson is not the most dangerous man alive. Not close. He was one of those who led/exploited the 1960s "Youth" movement. The weak-minded "youth" of the period were easy prey for such people. Not unlike the German Youth prior to the Great War
"The chiefs of the youth movement were mentally unbalanced neurotics. Many of them were affected by a morbid sexuality, they were either profligate or homosexual. None of them excelled in any field of activity or contributed anything to human progress. Their names are long since forgotten; the only trace they left were some books and poems preaching sexual perversity. But the bulk of their followers were quite different. They had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin.
"2. THE FATE OF THE RISING GENERATION WITHIN A BUREAUCRATIC ENVIRONMENT
The youth movement was an impotent and abortive revolt of youth against the menace of bureaucratization. It was doomed because it did not attack the seed of the evil, the trend toward socialization. It was in fact nothing but a confused expression of uneasiness, without any clear ideas and definite plans. The revolting adolescents were so completely under the spell of socialist ideas that they simply did not know what they wanted."
--von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
"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."
Well, if that's your starting premise, expect some serious pushback about the analysis flowing from it.
Dennis, not Brian, no?
I wonder how many STDs he caught while hanging with the family. Based on what I've read his girls were walking bio-weapons factories. Infected lots of music industry higher ups that enjoyed them as the price for tolerating Charlie.
I hope this shitbag "reporter" gets what's coming to him in hell. What garbage. I have to go clean my computer now.
And hope Sharon Tate's almost-born baby has haunted every day of his miserable, useless life.
This reminds me of Truman Capote and the Kansas murderers he eulogized in "In Cold Blood".
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.”
The goals and spritual structure of the great religions are radically different, and certainly in Christianity and Paul's quote specifically, being "all part of one body" is a metaphhor about unity of belief and the different roles we play. For one thing Christianity teaches the salvation of individuals.
In other words, this is the usual third-grade comprehension of religion in pop culture.
Some of the rest of this sounds nutso but I'll have to give it a closer look.
Looking back from a somewhat elderly perspective, its amazing how young the "Beach boys" were when they hit the jackpot in the 1962. One was 16, another 18, the rest were around 20. They really were "boys".
Just shows that Rock and roll really was a young man's game, because they didn't do much great original work after the age of 30. Weird that they knew Manson, who was only 28 in 1962. ANother person who knew Manson was Doris Day's son, who helped produce some of her music. He was 20, in 1962
Of course, it will be left out of the story that one reason that guys like Wilson & Dalton liked being around Charles Manson was that Manson surrounded himself with female acolytes who would perform oral sex on demand.
From the article:
"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."
The biblical quote is about the church, not humanity at large. Way out of context. I can't speak to the tenets of Hinduism or Buddhism, but in practice even adherents of those faiths have shown a remarkable degree of exclusivity and intolerance.
Fascinating. Evil always fascinates us.
The summer of 1970 - after my high school senior year - I was working for Anaheim’s Park and Rec Dept., delivering refreshments to the schools, parks and swimming pools and encountered my high school basketball coach. He brought up Manson and after cussing him for the hippie degenerate he was, opined that this society was to blame for “letting this Manson asshole run the streets”.
He was a helluva character and coach - his standard tirade when he’d have us running baseline to baseline in sets of six and thought we weren’t putting enough efforts in was “I’ll have your rectums! - and I didn’t disagree with his analysis.
Still don’t.
The Spahn Ranch is nowhere near Topanga Canyon (my former longtime home).
Remember this when journalists and musicians tell you who to vote for: Sometimes they aren't good judges of character.
Everything I despise about hippie Boomers in one article. You guys ruined a perfectly good country with your selfish, absurd,childish ideas. You really disgust me.
"The revolting adolescents were so completely under the spell of socialist ideas that they simply did not know what they wanted."
This will be a sub paragraph in the McMillan High School History text of 2035.
I have known many revolting adolescents.
In the anecdote at the top of the story the reference to Brian Wilson is incorrect. It was Dennis Wilson (whose wife at the time was Barbara). It is very likely that Brain Wilson never met Charles Manson.
The Manson song The Beach Boys recorded is called “Never Learn Not To Love”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Learn_Not_to_Love?wprov=sfti1
I was with a different group of folks--Infantry--when Manson was doing his thing. It was weird; like looking through....all the good metaphors are used up. We had sisters and moms, girlfriends and wives, school classmates, neighbors. We could not imagine--to the extent we worried about it--any of the women we knew getting wrapped up in nuts stuff like this. Impossible.
But when you're in a Big Ten school and somebody fires up a Beach Boys album on a gray February day in, maybe, 1968, and then somebody else is blasting Ventura Highway in the sunshine...maybe you think you're getting a tan and grateful somebody reminds you of sunshine.
Southern California got a lot of press in those days--flowers in your hair--California girls.
So maybe...tip the world and all the nutcases end up in Los Angeles.
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