If you read the blog regularly…or within the last couple months, you’d know that I said that the release of Charles Manson’s album “One Mind” had me re-visiting the Tate-LaBianca murders and the events thereafter. Well now I’m interested again, because there’s talk of Susan Atkins being released from prison because she’s dying of brain cancer. Ole’ Sadie Mae Glutz apparently has about 6 months to live, and wants to die with dignity...she wants people to show her compassion, and let her die a free woman.
How fucking ironic is that? She, at the end of her life, is making a plea for leniency just like Sharon Tate made to her almost 39 years ago.
But before we get in to that, let’s go back to how I originally became interested in this all over again. Honestly it began like this; I found myself unable to sleep on a Saturday night so I decided to read my favorite news sites on the internet, came across the story about Manson’s album release, and then began a many hours long journey into online literature about this, the most well known string of murders in American history. Like most people, I’ve always found this event eerily fascinating, and I’m often torn on my thoughts of the subject…my mind is all over the place about this subject, starting with the most basic thoughts….can one man *truly* indoctrinate others in to a way of thinking that would lead them to commit such heinous acts? Can drugs play such a role that people could be left remorseless after committing such acts? Most importantly, is Manson more of a creation of the media than anything else?
I also find this situation to be interesting because I think it’s the first time that America’s media really demonstrated it’s power to sway the mentality of the Country in such a profound way. I think that there’s a lot of truth to the things that Manson says about the media, and society for that matter.
Not that I sympathize with Manson, nor do I think he should be out on the street right now from a moral positioning, but I do believe that the media took a guy who for all intents and purposes, meant nothing to anyone, and made him in to a larger than life personification of evil. I also find people’s thought process on the crime interesting as a result. It almost seems as if people find Manson more appalling than those who actually committed the murders. I’ve never quite gotten this. In fact, I read on that Saturday night that people actually think that once Manson passes away, the others would be more likely to be paroled.
What the hell is THAT about?
Is the thinking that if Manson isn’t around to *control* their thoughts anymore, that they’ll be able to be productive members of society?
This goes back to the point I was making….the American media has truly convinced people that Manson is more than he is and if you suggest otherwise, you’re viewed as a Manson sympathizer. But I’m just trying to talk common sense here…Doris Tate (Sharon Tate’s Mother) got it. She said in an interview I saw that she wasn’t much concerned with Manson…that we should be more concerned with the others, because they, she believed, actually have the possibility of making parole. She got it, like I do…but I don’t see a lot of other people who see things this way. They *believe* in Charlie…in fact, I would go so far as to say that if believing in Charlie and all of his powers makes one part of “The Family”, then the media and most of the populace at large should just collectively re-locate to Spahn Ranch. They’ve brought EVERYONE in to the fold.
To them, Charlie is the epicenter of all that is evil…those poor kids were just under his spell….as soon as he’s gone, everything will be ok again. It’s almost like the ending of a movie where once you kill the head vampire, everyone else returns to normal.
Silly, no?
Maybe it’s just me, but I find something much more disturbing about Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. When I reflect on what they did…when I really put myself there…I’m left with an amazingly uneasy feeling.
I spent a lot of time reading testimony on that Saturday night….I spent a lot of time looking at crime scene photos, video tours of the now non existent house, and reading the details of the crime. I read of how excited Atkins was as she plunged a knife into her victim…how she found it “sexually exciting”. I read of how she listened to Sharon Tate beg her for her life and for the life of her unborn child, and then how she explained to Tate that she just needed to accept that she was about to die and there was nothing she could do about it.
I read of the things she and Watson wanted to do to the bodies afterward, but didn’t get to because of time constraints.
Then I read of how it wasn’t 100% Susan and Tex’s fault….Charlie said it was ok to take such extreme pleasure in such an evil deed.
One of the things that struck me the most was the murder of Abigail Folger. I read that as she was tackled on the front lawn and being stabbed by Patricia Krenwinkel, she screamed out “I’m already dead!” Imagine that. Imagine knowing that you have suffered such devasting wounds that there’s no way that you’re going to survive, and telling your attacker to stop because they’ve already done their job…but having no idea why. Imagine lying on the grass staring up at the sky on that August night in California as your life bleeds out of the twenty-eight stab wounds you’ve suffered as you hear the pleas from Sharon back in the house. You’re completely unable to comprehend what’s happening to you and around you as your life fades to black….you never imagined the night would end this way while you and your three friends shared dinner and drinks at a Mexican restaurant just hours earlier.
Now imagine being the person that did it to her.
Don’t feel bad…it wasn’t YOUR doing…Charlie told you to…you couldn’t help it.
His words of encouragement afforded you the ability to slash, and stab, and slash some more…without conscience. These were rich “Piggies” after all.
Ok, good, we’re cool because I didn’t want anyone to have to go around and feel like THEY were actually were responsible for their own actions!
DOWN WITH PIGS AND…..What’s that? Steven who?
Oh, Steven Parent…yeah, people often like to forget about him in this story. After all, he wasn’t famous…he wasn’t wealthy…he wasn’t a “piggie” by Charlie’s definition.
But Tex Watson still murdered him in cold blood. I wonder if Charlie told him to do that?
I mean, that doesn’t work does it? If the “piggies” were the rich and famous, how does an 18 year old who was visiting a groundskeeper friend and trying to sell him a stereo fit in to the plan? It must have been ok with Charlie, after all, anyone so eager to please his master…even to the point of human butchery…surely would NEVER act in a way that may displease the all charismatic Charlie. I suppose we can just go with the “no witnesses” angle though.
These days, Tex Watson is a preacher. He’s found God.
What?
No, I know that’s HIGHLY uncommon for people in prison who want to make parole, but Tex isn’t a follower anymore! Why even today, he’ll tell you how none of what he did was his fault.
It was his parent’s fault, and college’s fault, and mostly Charlie’s fault…but NONE on him! This is an excerpt from an interview with Shadow Steele:
"I was very unhappy in college, just carrying out my parent's vision for my life. I had no sound identity, no goals of my own, no satisfaction. I had become a people pleaser, a follower, looking for direction, and ripe to be used by Manson. Slowly, his twisted philosophy seemed to offer us answers, but in the end, Manson had no true answers, only lies he invented."
Poor Tex…he was just a people pleaser! I wonder how pleased Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger and Steven Parent were with Tex after he “introduced” himself to them on August 9, 1969?
And how THRILLED Leno and Rosemary LaBianca must have been the following night!
Nothing says people pleasing like having a serving fork repeatedly plunged in to you, right?
This mentality…this diabolical behavior isn’t something that can be “put” in to your head. It’s something that just has to be there….and I don’t believe something like that EVER goes away. I think it simply exists in people like this, the same way normal people get excited about love…it’s just that something is twisted…there’s some backwards wiring.
Sometimes, things…people, are just….wrong.
The thing that haunts me the most about this is something that I saw while watching an MSNBC Special entitled “The Mind of Manson”. The two hosts reflected on clips from a 1987 interview with Manson conducted by Heidi Schulman. One clip in particular struck me.
Manson was going on about the trial back then, and the media coverage of it. He said something to the effect of:
“I told that judge….I told him back then….don’t let America see this. I told him….my children are coming.”
The two hosts more or less laughed at Manson saying that he was delusional and believed that his “family” would grow in to an army of sorts.
But is that what he meant?
I would suggest that Manson knew something that the judge and clearly these two hosts STILL didn’t. I would suggest he was telling that judge back then that with allowing the media coverage of “The Family”, he was about to open a door that would never be able to close again…that he was about to alter the course of American society and what it would now be desensitized/accustomed to.
In the course of time since the Mason Family murders and the media frenzy that surrounded it, we’ve seen society change dramatically.
Since that time, we’ve had music that embraces Satanism, murderous gang lifestyles, and sexual debauchery…and it’s become our norm.
We have films that depict grotesque levels of violence, and it’s become our norm….so much so that the very characters that commit the butchery in these films are now made in to action figures and other forms of collectibles.
We have online sites that exist ONLY to show real images of death, and it’s become our norm.
We have radio programs that are FILLED with what a once respectful society would have deemed too obscene to air, and it’s our norm.
We have Charles Manson t-shirts and merchandise, and it’s our norm.
We've have Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails recording albums in the VERY room where these murders took place at 10050 Cielo Drive.
We had Marilyn Manson, a man who took the stage name of Manson and who is the self professed "Anti-Christ Superstar"...joining him on these recording sessions.
We aren't shocked anymore.
We aren't horrified anymore.
Who are we now?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not playing morality police here…I’m guilty too…but when you stop and look around…I mean take a GOOD, honest look around…well….don’t you see it?
Are WE his children? As a society that is?
Is our current position in the morality chart what he was referring to when he said his children were coming?
No you tool, I don’t think Charlie has spooky powers….just a fundamental understanding of human nature. That people are what they are…they grow a certain way based on what’s around them...what's acceptable.
In other cases...the wiring is just bad...the design is flawed somehow.
WE’VE grown into this society…we weren’t made this way overnight…it was an evolution of sorts…or perhaps a DE-evolution.
A little bit here….a little bit there.
This all goes back to my original point.
You couldn’t take someone from the time period before the Manson Family murders and put them in our society today.
They simply would be horrified at what they saw…unless of course, it was already in them.
On the flipside, you couldn’t take four young people from that time back then…one a college student…one a beauty pageant winner…all from decent homes, and convince them to do something horrific by societal standards…unless of course, it was already in them. They didn’t fall in to Charlie’s way of thinking because of who he was, they gravitated towards him because it’s who THEY were.
Fundamental understanding of human nature.
Only in such a distorted society, so distanced from the time before that August night in 1969, could we be confused as to how Susan Atkins life should end.
“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy!”
~Charles Manson
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