Charlie
Essay title: Charlie
Thirty years later, the Sixties remain shrouded in myth, demonology, and nostalgia. To young Generation Xers, that decade is a stumbling block; to Republican conservatives, foolishness; but to aging baby boomers who once felt themselves called to respond, that era still recalls something dimly remembered of an expedition into the heart of consciousness. Something happened still not understood. A wave broke in August 1969 when the followers of Charley Manson slaughtered Sharon Tate, her unborn child, her house guests, and the next night repeated the bloody ritual by killing a prominent couple named the La Biancas.
Today, Manson is in solitary confinement in a maximum security foretress in California. Denied probation, he will die in prison. But even there he continues to attract followers and to dispense his message to the world. Even there, he continues to maintain a hold. As he well understands, we need him as much as he needs us. We need to believe that the demon is locked up and cannot get out. We need this to protect our own sanity. He remains, as he says, our mirror.
Terror manifests itself in many forms, most of them coming not from outside ourselves but from within. The external objects and events that scare us merely awaken fears slumbering in what Emily Dickinson called the cellars of the mind. The beasts under the bed, the monsters in the night shadows moving behind the trees are the projections of our own internal fears onto the landscape of the world. Enough real evil does exist to sustain our projections, but in the end even the projections are rationalizations, lies we tell ourselves to prevent having to face the real fear within ourselves. We need external demons to keep the demons in our souls at bay.
By the end of the sixties, for the baby boomers the beliefs of the old military/industrial combine had unraveled. The protective shell had been shattered and thrown away. With our protective social constructs crumbling, all that was left was the state of nature waiting to reveal itself as either friend or fiend. The idyllic suburbia of “Leave it to Beaver” had become a bad joke. John Wayne was no longer there to protect us from the Indians or lead the way to the next watering hole. and the hot sun was climbing over the rim of the desert. Out of that desert emerged the very apparition that had always been there coiled up in the heart of the culture. Indians, wolves, monsters under the bed. Commies coming to get us, the Viet Cong, “Victor Charley”, and finally that other Charlie, Charlie Manson.
Joan Didion remembers that in Los Angeles in August, 1969, “everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of sin -this sense that it was possible to go too far, and that many people were doing it – was very much with us.” She remembered when the first reports came in, garbled, confused, contradictory, and, she wrote, “I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
“I am the man in the mirror,” says Charles Manson. And in that at least he may be right. “Anything you see in me is in you…. I am you…. And when you can admit that you will be free. I am just a mirror.” Nor is that the least that he is right about. And because he was and has since become even more of a symbol, not just of the end of the sixties, but of the terror that lies at the heart of the darkest cave in consciousness, he compels a more careful study.
Why then is Charlie Manson, as Geraldo Rivera said, “the stuff of a nations nightmares?” Not for what he did, nor even for what he said. Others have killed more people more brutally. It is because, as Didion foretold, we found in him an icon upon which to project our own latent fears. No one was surprised because everyone knew the potential was there, in each and all of us. So Manson became a living metaphor of Abaddon, the God of the bottomless pit. We, as a collective culture, looked into Mansons eyes and saw in those dark caves what we most feared within ourselves, the paranoia of what might happen if you go too far. He was the monster in the wilderness, the shadow in the night forest, the beast said to lurk in the Terra Incognita beyond the edges of the map. By projecting our monsters onto Manson, and then locking him up for life, we imagined we had put the beast back in its cage.
Charlie Manson was exactly what the feudal European establishment foresaw and feared in 1517 when Martin Luther had first dared to suggest that truth lay not in the rationalizations of the scholastics but in the subjectivities of the spirit. Such philosophical abstractions are fine for the educated who converse with each other in Latin and, in the final analysis, know what social codes sustain them. But to preach such things to peasants invites anarchy of the wildest