California overturned the death penalty shortly after the Manson family was sentenced to death. The punishment was commuted to life in prison for the five. Charles, et al, spent the next forty-five years locked. Pretty good gig if you can get it. Most of you are going Huh, Huh? Are you out of your mind?
Let’s compare and contrast. Charlie spent his entire youth in orphanages, foster care or juvenile detention facilities. Charlie not only never met his father, his mother was never formally introduced. LA would have been different for Sharon Tate and her friends if Charlie’s father had opted for a blowjob.
The summer of 69 and one of Manson’s forays into free world introduced him to peace, love, and dope. He displayed a talent for attracting promiscuous runaway females. This wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Since they were homeless and on the street, they couldn’t keep him in the style he required. The girls did attract boys so Charlie’s sexual horizon was set. What followed was a series of squats, dumpster diving, prostitution, auto thefts, pretensions to forming a rock and roll band and nascent race warrior. All of these efforts carried off in half-assed Charlie Manson Style. Manson and family left the best for last, the slaughter of six innocents on consecutive August nights, just because they could.
The rest is, as they say, history. Manson and family are caught and convicted and settle in to do life sentences. Where is the punishment? At various times, Charlie made the cover of Rolling Stone and Time Magazine. He was treated as a counter-culture hero. Of the five convicted, only Susan Atkins and Charles Manson have died. Had things played out differently, they would all have been executed thirty years ago.
Given their adolescent, young adult history would any of this crew survived to the ripe old age of seventy? I don’t think so? Were they punished or safely cocooned within the bowels of the California Department of Corrections? People forget life happens when a judge sentences an inmate to forty years in prison, that is not a guarantee of long life. This is the minimum amount of time the judge demands of the inmate to pay the bill for his transgressions.
Do any of you readers get fan mail? Do you have a staff to screen it? Charlie did. Has Time, Rolling Stone or Sixty Minutes ever knocked on your door asking for an interview? Are you treated like an elder statesman for your generation?
The reality is Manson and family were a bunch of fuckups who couldn’t make it on the outside. Left to their own devices, they all would have succumbed to disease, drug overdose or murder. Given their limitations as human beings they ended up in liberal nirvana. Only the government has guns. Food, clothing, medical, dental care are all provided at no cost. Sex is where you find it, inconsequential, plentiful and with no consequence. Rules are petty and plentiful and the penalty for violation inconsequential; an ideal environment for a rebel without a clue and the sycophants that are impressed.
So the legend continued, until the other day, one contraband cigarette, one sip of pruno, one more sign of disrespect to a corrections officer at a time illustrate a fiction. That a supremely broken man, hardly deserving of the term, remained unbroken.
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