CSotD: A Tale of Two Charlies
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Here's a cheesy cartoon I did before I went through the lineup this morning, in anticipation of the flood of cheesy Charlie and the Devil cartoons I suspected would arise.
And, sure enough, there were some of those, though there were other commentaries on his death that didn't use the Hell's Gates cliche but which still touched on two aspects that bother me.
The main one is that declaring Charles Manson a bad person is not exactly going out on a limb. There might be a few people who think he was some kind of anti-hero, but that leads to Issue #2, which is …
Whether Charlie is dead or alive is immaterial. He was locked up for about half a century and, while it might serve some interest to occasionally remember him — mostly when one of his family members came up for parole, or when he did — there was never any real reason to go back and interview him or do much more than say "Manson is still in the joint."
If he'd gotten paroled, that would have been pretty interesting, yes, but it sure wasn't in the cards.
There were a lot of sketchy people hanging around in the Sixties, because the ethos of acceptance drew them in, and I'm grateful, because, as a future journalist, I got to know a lot of people I would never have met in a less open-handed era.
But even in those nonjudgmental days, there were limits.
Tom Wolfe may wax rhapsodic over the Hell's Angels in "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," but Wolfe was a tourist.
Contrast that with how Peter Coyote, who ran with the Angels, describes them in "Sleeping Where I Fall," his insider memoir of the era: They were his friends, but only to the degree someone like that is anybody's friend, and he had his head on a swivel the whole time, knowing that these were dangerous people.
What was interesting about Charlie was not that he existed, but that there were people so damaged and sad and vulnerable that they weren't frightened and repelled by him.
And it would be nice and neat and simple to explain, if they were all Squeaky Fromme and nearly as nuts as he was.
But if you look beyond, and consider some of his other followers, it stops being so easy to make judgments, because they could have been your friends or your kids.
They were bright, reasonably normal-seeming people who somehow got drawn into his scene.
How?
My take on it all is this: If a bunch of unprepared hikers went up Mt. Washington in February and were found frozen, we might ponder at length why they didn't take the right equipment or what impelled them to try such a hare-brained adventure in the first place.
But I don't think we'd spend a lot of time debating whether minus-40 Fahrenheit qualifies as "cold."
Yeah, Charles Manson was a bad guy. You don't win anything for pointing that out.
In fact, dismissing Manson as evil is missing his significance entirely.
The revelations about Charlie Rose are far more interesting and, unlike the cartoonists who simply pour out hostility and scorn on Manson, Steve Breen asks the right question about Rose.
Though I'd switch it around: "How do so many men who behave like pigs amass such power?"
Obviously, Rose didn't order anyone to commit murder and, while lives were disrupted and soured by his behavior, it seems everyone pretty much survived, albeit with some significant scars.
But Charlie Manson couldn't function in society and guys like Charlie Rose flourish in it, and it's not just because one guy orders murders and the other guy simply walks around naked in front of the young women who work for him.
Well, they probably both walked around naked in front of the young women in their circle, but maybe that's part of my point: The pair of them would make one helluvan interesting Venn diagram.
I addressed, at least in part, one aspect of this a few days ago: There are guys who devote too much time to amassing credentials and not enough time learning how to relate to other people.
But that's superficial and silly.
Behind it, however, are all the reasons some people need power and some people don't, and there's one helluvan interesting Venn diagram in that, as well.
My freshman year roomie was the only child of blue-collar immigrants who focused on getting him through private school and into a prestigious university and he didn't let them down: He got good grades and became a renowned surgeon, and, while I still chuckle over how clumsy he was with women, he was a good guy.
But there are far less healthy ways to be motivated towards achievement, and the pressures and misadventures that drive one person to the top of the hill may drive another into the penitentiary. (And, yes, sometimes both.)
Reading about Charlie Rose made me wonder about the young women who didn't just GTFO when he started in on his creepy routine.
One of them, however, explained it rather well. She didn't just want the job, but desperately needed it.
And his trick of trapping them at his remote house overnight with no way home is scary enough that I'll cut them all some slack.
Not sure how much slack I'd cut his assistant, though. She apparently was in charge of deflecting and covering up. Charlie has a lot to answer for, but so does she.
Bottom Line: For all their differences, with either Charlie, we miss the point entirely if we put too much energy into building hate against them rather than asking the question Breen asked, perhaps turned as I suggested.
And while I realize this is a far more acceptable question in the former case than the latter, the truly interesting issue is why do guys like this have any followers at all?
How do we fail our own children, that they could be vulnerable to either Charlie?
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