Charles Manson Embodied the Worst of the 1960's - and Every Era Since. By Jack Hamilton
Any honest accounting of the cultural
legacy of the 1960s has to reckon with Charles Manson, who died Sunday at the
age of 83. Manson was a human monster whose sole talent was being able to
identify the most loathsome potentials of that decade’s zeitgeist and bend them
to his own hideous will. He was a terrifying mix of violence, sexual exploitation,
and virulent racism, a narcissistic psychopath who used and abused everyone in
his path and dedicated his own life to the destruction of others’. In 1969 he
devised two nights’ worth of unfathomable slaughter, committed by his followers
at his behest, and in so doing obtained the only thing he’d ever wanted:
celebrity. Charles Manson embodied the very worst of his era and, to no small
degree, every era since.
Born in Cincinnati in
1934, Manson’s early childhood was defined by abuse and neglect, the worst
possible environment for a boy who exhibited signs of severe personality
disorder from a young age. He spent his teenage years in and out of reformatory
schools and detention centers, where he was both victim and purveyor of all
types of abuse. He married twice during the 1950s, the second time to a
16-year-old whom he’d been pimping, a union he used to preclude her from
testifying against him for passing bad checks. Manson was a masterful
manipulator of people, a man with a preternatural ability to spot weakness in
others and exploit it for his own ends.
In the early ’60s,
Manson learned to play guitar in prison, and as that decade roared on, he began
harboring ambitions of becoming a rock ’n’ roll star. From a musical
standpoint, Manson was a talentless fraud whose interest in rock ’n’ roll was
entirely inseparable from his desire for fame, money, and power. He was, of
course, neither the first nor last to fit that particular description, but his
quixotic ambitions quickly bled into delusions, evidenced most prominently in
his growing obsession with the Beatles, whom Manson came to view as equal parts
inspirations, professional rivals, and psychic interlocutors… read more:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/11/charles_manson_dead_at_83_weaponized_the_1960s.html
