Helter Skelter

Family member on Charles Manson: "Everybody does what he says, even before he'll say it--know what I mean?"--Helter Skelter

Yesterday I saw the three-hour 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter with Dawna and Debi, based on prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Charles Manson case.  When it was over I said, "I may sleep with the lights on tonight!"

The recently deceased Charles Manson is a disturbing figure indeed!  He surely wasn't playing with a full deck.  His "family" was an aberration even by the standards of hippie counterculture. His handwriting kept running off the page because he didn't recognize limits.  According to a recent biography, during an earlier prison stretch he'd taken Dale Carnegie courses and learned from pimps how to manipulate women.  

The whole business was so crazy that I have a feeling we'll never be sure exactly why they did it. (I wonder if the truth is even crazier than Bugliosi's theory involving the Beatles song and race war?) It's like they might have murdered anyone!  The Family once stole a couple's outdoor-mounted telescope just to scare them--that would have worked with me. Back in the '90s Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell dismissed the Republican "family values" soundbite as "Manson family values."

Today was the Reading Out Loud Meetup event, whose topic was British writing, which I titled "The Lion and the Unicorn." I read the part of Orwell's The Animal Farm where Boxer got sold to the slaughterhouse for a case of whiskey; the opening verses of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Lewis Carroll's really funny poem "The White Knight's Tale."