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My 2021 New Years Revolution

At the end of the previous year, I wrote and sent out a little poem speaking to how 2019 had been a rough row to hoe, and raising hints for the better times ahead in 2020. The dubious quality of lyrical content aside, it’s obvious that I’m hardly a reliable oracle.

Now, with the passing of another rough year, a part of me is wishing we could skip 2021 altogether and use the time to get a running start at 2022. If the previous year was a difficult row to hoe, this last one has been a bitch in the ditch, and it worries me that tough years might run in threes.

  But then, it’s already a clearly established fact that when it comes to making predictions about the future my track record is dismal. With that understanding, here comes the straight skinny as I see it, unvarnished by flowery platitudes.

We’re all doomed. The world is on fire, literally and figuratively. People living in regions all over the world are drowning in suffering and misery, variously being ravaged by devastating storms, floods, mudslides, massive wildfires, earthquakes, plagues of infectious disease, abject poverty, hunger and thirst, joblessness, homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, mass incarceration, suicide, violent political upheaval, religio-political terrorism, widespread ethnicism and endemic ethnic genocide, organized predatory thuggery, and war. Burgeoning multitudes of people have left their homelands to join increasing populations of refugees in search of a safer and better life, some now imprisoned in refugee camps where conditions are poor and despair flourishes.

  Looming over all of us, regardless of social standing or affiliation, like a dark cloud overshadowing this entire litany of tragedy and disaster, are shifts in the weathersphere so massive and momentous that the narrow conditions that make this planet habitable for our species are collapsing faster than most scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Moreover, we are woefully behind the 8-ball in taking those measures we must take if we are to have any chance at all of slowing, let alone stopping and reversing, this implacably advancing threat to our continued existence.

  The debate between industrialist profiteers and the scientific community over whether or not climate change is real has us lagging in our response to the threat, when we don’t have the luxury of time to fool around. At the rate we’re going, greed and willful ignorance may spell our extinction as a species. It should not be so hard to arrive at some consensus on the basis of our own senses alone, science notwithstanding. When smoke from monstrous fires in the western states this past year darkened the skies over Europe, that alone should be enough to cinch the case in the minds of intelligent persons. I am left with a lingering cough after two months of breathing that same smoke, so I’m definitely convinced.

  And as if we needed any more distraction from the need of rising to meet these challenges, there’s an orange guy in the White House who has barricaded himself in the bathroom, refusing to comply with the eviction notice that was, along with his ass, recently handed to him. Enough already!

  Have I overlooked anything in this doomsday review? Oh, yeah ... the viral pandemonium. Perhaps I should’ve led with that considering how it has played such a devastating role in the lives of us all, and how large it has been playing in my personal life.

Prisons notoriously make an ideal environment for the spread of an infectious disease. The prison where I reside has been on varying degrees of CoVid-19 lockdown since last March. The number of coronavirus infections among prisoners and staff has been relatively low compared to some of the other prisons in the state. Inter-facility transfers of prisoners have been halted for the most part, with quarantine protocols in place for transfers deemed necessary, such as in the case of a medical emergency.

  The danger of an unknowingly infected prison employee being the source of coronavirus transmission inside the prison is minimized by subjecting staff to temperature checks when they arrive for work, and weekly CoVid-19 testing. The system is fairly reliable but not foolproof. With the spike in community spread after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and a significant rise of new cases among prisoners, the authorities took the precaution of putting the facility on full lockdown as of the beginning of December. All I wanted for Christmas was a hot shower. That didn’t happen.

  Despite the hardships, I’m grateful to all the local decision-makers who have kept me, and most others in here, safe from coronavirus infection during this time.

  Am I suffering from pandemic fatigue? You betcha! And I’m probably a little too fixated on the news from outside for my own good. It’s like I’m feeling all the pain and confusion people are suffering in the world these days, and I don’t exactly know what I’m supposed to do with that.

Unlike the other challenges to survival that our species is facing, this one, the current pandemic, is not manmade. A virus is a lifeform produced by nature. Some of the notions I’ve heard ascribed to the CoVid-19 pandemic strike me as pretty weird. Bizarre absurdities.

  This pandemic is not God’s judgement on humanity. It is not a morality play, not karma, nor is it nature’s way of culling the human populations with any kind of intelligent plan or intention. A virus, or any other microbe that might make us sick, is neither good nor bad. To nature, the progenitor of all lifeforms on this planet, a parasite is just as valid a form of life as its host. Any species, one supremely intelligent or one as gormless as a slug, must adapt to prevailing conditions or perish, simple as that. And nature is too busy making the next new thing to care about the outcome one way or the other.

  But we humans care. We tend to be curious creatures, and some of us observe what nature is doing very closely. Biologists believe that most if not all of the viruses that have plagued us across the millennia (for many of which we carry instructions coded in our DNA to immunize us against their former ability to make us sick) emerged out of bat caves, where there are steamy brews of bat poop and bugs and microorganisms, all squirming around in the muck and experimentally mutating. Mother Nature likes to play with herself in the dark, cooking up new life.

  New viral contagions are typically delivered to humans and other mammals by unwitting bats, as it is believed happened to trigger our current pandemic. Just last week I listened to a talk by a biologist who described how he and others in his field are capturing bats to swab their mouths for new viruses, to map the viral DNA for the development of vaccines that might be used to make pre-emptive strikes on future pandemics. The researchers are also vaccinating bats to prevent them from contracting diseases and transmitting them to human beings and other mammals. What’s more, they’re getting the bats to inoculate each other. Bats like to lick one another’s fur. If a vaccine is applied to the fur of one bat, that bat will then carry the vaccine to all of the other bats in its cohort. Clever, eh? Turns out it’s a whole lot easier to inoculate a population of bats than it is to inoculate eight billion people.

  This time around, though, we’ll be doing it the old-fashioned way. The US is in the midst of a somewhat rocky rollout of the first CoVid-19 vaccines. Certainly, we are at the beginning of the end of this pandemic, but we are far from being out of the woods. Infections are peaking in many parts of the world. Even with multiple vaccines being made available we are looking at some long months before we begin to get the pandemic under control. The majority of the world’s population must be inoculated against the virus before a high enough level of immunization is reached to be able to say we’ve beaten this strain of coronavirus.

  We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the out-going administration for the success of the Operation Warp Speed vaccine development program. This truly remarkable achievement is a testament to what is possible when people pool their ideas and come together in a concerted way to realize a goal. It’s a pretty safe bet that it wasn’t Donald Trump’s own strategy (Dr. Trump’s idea, remember, was a cleansing injection of bleach), but it happened on his watch, and it was his administration’s task force that rallied the pharmaceutical companies to tackle vaccine development. In spite of his almost criminally lackadaisical and disingenuous approach to the handling of the pandemic in this country he deserves the credit for this remarkable success.

  Yes, I’m aware that this acknowledgment seems somewhat begrudging. Sorry, it’s the best I can manage for now.

No one is to be blamed for a natural catastrophe, of course, but it didn’t have to be so bad. Unfortunately for folks in the US, and some other countries, we were hit with the global outbreak of an infectious disease at a time when we had saddled ourselves with nationalist leadership predisposed to protecting its self-interest. When suddenly facing the ravages of a pandemic societies quickly discover that there is little protective value in meticulously drawn arbitrary borders and their assortments of barricades. Ethnic and religious divisions, gender biases, ideological disagreements, class divisions, and the myriad other contrivances we humans have devised to separate ourselves from one another only serve to disguise the fact of our commonality and get in the way of concerted efforts needed to beat back our common enemy.

  Without equivocation, my position is that all of humanity is of common stock. Responsibility for oneself carries with it the need to be responsible for one another. Just try to name a single thing that should be more unifying than a common threat to our existence. The coronavirus itself recognizes our commonality better than many of we humans do. To the virus we are just one big yummy feast, and the perfect playground to propagate its species.

  The next time we are confronted by the challenges of a pandemic disease — and I hate to break it to you, there will be many next times — we may be too late in responding to it if we fail to learn some important lessons from the current experience. We may be too slow on the uptake if we have to adjust for being misled by leaders who have convinced us that the enemies to be guarded against are brown border jumpers, foreign religious zealots, asylum seekers, the free press and members of the opposing political party. These constructs of suspicion and fear tend to be the foundation of self-fulfilling prophesy; these mocked-up preoccupations are ultimately revealed to be frivolous when natural phenomena catastrophically assume pre-eminence on a global scale.

  In this case prejudice, fear, complacency and petty self-interest conspired to distract us from preparing for what we had long been told by the experts in communicable disease would certainly come. It was a failure that turned out to be debilitating and even fatal for a great many people, a failure to take enough notice of the little things. A tiny invisible enemy was sneaking up on us.

  The invader hitched a ride in a bat and was transported into Wuhan by an enterprising trader in exotic wild animals, brought to market for eating by people. Or so it was conjectured during the earliest investigations of the outbreak, which means it’s likely closest to the truth of the various theories that have been tendered in the past year.

  Oh, the perils of eating bats in the 21st Century!

Now, speaking strictly for myself, although I have a fairly adventurous palette for a westerner, I have a very hard time wrapping my mind around the notion of eating any part of a bat. It gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about the sorts of places bats hang out in during the day, the corpses of their fellows littering the floors of their caves along with all the other creepy stuff roiling down there, and triggers my gag reflex when I associate that with eating one of those critters. But that’s just me, so no judgements. Sensibilities vary from one culture to another. In parts of Asia in particular, virtually any creature that crawls, flaps, swims, squirms, buzzes, hops, waddles, or what have you, is on the menu. In some of these cultures it is believed that certain animals, or parts of animals, impart curative or enhancing benefits when consumed. Now we know there can be unwelcome consequences to some of these practices.

  It is possible, I suspect, that the Chinese government was slow to inform the rest of the world about the outbreak because, perhaps, it would mean losing face to have to admit that some Chinese citizens are inclined to put highly unusual items on their dinner plates. And maybe they believed that they could contain the outbreak before anyone in other nations became the wiser. Reportedly, the wet markets where exotic animals were being sold for food in Wuhan have been shut down by the government, suggesting my surmise may be the right of it.

Blame is one of the most unproductive behaviors a person can engage in, it seems to me. Donald Trump apparently believes otherwise. Like a common schoolyard bully, he makes up derogatory names for people he doesn’t like or who threaten or thwart him, and deflects responsibility for his failings by blaming others. Both of these propensities are dominant features in his personality that he has brought into the office of the presidency. He has consistently, without evident shame, employed infantile name-calling and blaming throughout his tenure as the POTUS whenever he is confronted by an obstacle he is ill-equipped to deal with.

  And that’s what gripes me about the guy: that he occupies the space reserved for a most important leader while lacking any real leadership qualities at a time when leadership is what this country needs most.

  In keeping with his immature propensities, Trump wasted no time in shifting all the blame for the pandemic onto the Chinese, calling it “the China plague” during his speeches. He has yet to mention, as far as I know, that Chinese geneticists acted immediately to make the genetic code of the new coronavirus public as soon as they had mapped it. This shaved valuable time off the vaccine development period so that big pharma companies could get vaccines to us rapidly. In a pandemic there is much more to be gained by cooperating than with divisive rhetoric. The virus is a threat to all people of all nations equally, after all.

I knew we were in trouble when, in the early stages of the pandemic spread, Trump appointed his dipped-in-Colgate VP to head the new coronavirus task force team. For a time, President Trump stood to one side, self-consciously rotating to and fro from his hips like a mechanical Santa in a store window while his yes-man and health experts did the talking. This couldn’t last for long. Trump commandeered control of the microphone and returned to making vague reassurances to America, playing down the severity of the pandemic, saying he had it all under control, and emphasizing the need to get the economy back on track at all costs. He contradicted the guidance of medical experts on his own task force with his talk of quack remedies and cures, as if wishful thinking could ever be a replacement for real and responsible policy.

  It became clear to me then that to Donald J. Trump, even in the face of a dire national threat, the only thing truly important is what’s good for Donald J. Trump. How he might look to the supporters of his re-election campaign would henceforth take precedence over any other consideration, including the safety and well-being of the American citizenry.

Absolutely unconscionable to me is that the erstwhile leader of the free world would fail to inform the American people just how infectious the viral outbreak is, and how severe and potentially deadly the CoVid-19 illness could be, as soon as he knew. And when the extreme seriousness of the pandemic became self-evident, he again failed to lead, failed in his responsibility as a president to recommend and exemplify the safeguards that help to slow the spread of the disease and help to provide personal protections against getting infected. He failed his office by failing the people.

  Trump said he didn’t like to wear a mask because he thought it made him look weak, and chided others around him for wearing one as a way of badgering them into following his bad example. Well, take it from someone who has lived for more than half a century in a world where guys who want to look tough are in abundance: the need to look tough to others is the refuge of one with weaknesses to hide. Hard looks may seem impressive in a theatrical wrestling ring where bombast and athleticism are combined to make a show of being tough, but hard looks have never won a war in real life. In my experience, giving people hard looks is an invitation to getting a punch in the face.

There was a time in this country, and it was not so long ago, when it was understood that being an American carried with it a certain level of patriotic responsibility, or civic duty. It was considered a small price to pay for the freedoms we enjoy. Seeking to support the well-being of fellow citizens, even when a sacrifice of some sort may be involved, was believed to be about the most patriotic thing one could do.

  Nowadays we have American citizens wrapping themselves in American flags and sporting American insignia, as if to say they are more patriotic than those other Americans, while refusing to do a few little simple things that would truly support their country at this time. By modifying their behavior in accordance with the expert guidance they would help to safeguard themselves, their immediate families and cohorts, neighbors and other Americans, as well as severely challenged hospitals from the ravages of coronavirus infection.

  The excuse used by elected officials and regular citizens for refusing to go along with the guidance from the medical community is the need to get the US economy back on track at all costs. Many people are stricken by the loss of their livelihoods, so this is understandable, if acutely myopic. If the US health care system collapses as a result of being overwhelmed with coronavirus cases the economic consequences will be orders of magnitude worse than what we’re already experiencing. This is because the health care system is intimately connected to many other parts of the economy, through insurance companies, employers, corporate holdings, drug manufacturers and suppliers, banks, first responders, etc. The collapse of a hospital triggers a domino-effect cascade of financial disruption downstream.

  During the second World War the government imposed strict curfews, blackouts, mandated selective service in the military, commandeered private manufacturing for wartime uses, implemented rationing and other austerities. These government orders were a hardship or an inconvenience to the country’s citizens, yet few of them complained. Everyone understood it was their duty as patriots to comply with the measures the government deemed necessary to defeat a determined enemy and win the war for the free world.

  The current pandemic has already killed more Americans in the past year than were killed in all four years of WWII combined. This evening I heard a news report that decried a record 4000 Americans dying from complications from CoVid-19 in just the past 24 hours. We are at war. Make no mistake about it. The out-going president’s cavalier attitude regarding CoVid-19 casualties notwithstanding, we have to be on a wartime footing if we are to succeed in keeping the number of deaths of our citizens to a minimum and avoid the complete collapse of our economy.

  Some very brave nurses, doctors, medical technicians and other healthcare professionals have been fighting on behalf of all of us for the better part of a year. Many are exhausted, some are experiencing PTSD or something very much like it, while struggling and failing to stay ahead of the rate of infection. Other frontline workers, too, some of them immigrants, some of them undocumented, have put themselves in jeopardy to keep us safe, and keep us in food and supplies, largely freeing us from the need to be concerned about these necessities so we can hunker down and slow the spread. All they have asked from us in return was just a few simple things: wash our hands, wear a mask, keep a reasonable distance from anyone outside of our personal cohort, and stay at home when possible.

  Yet we have a large segment of the US population waving American flags and wearing MAGA apparel who have made the refusal to wear a mask and socially distance a symbolic gesture of loyalty to the Ignoramus In Chief, in defiance of the common good. My God, I wonder where the America my father joined the Marines to fight for in WWII has gone.

  Hypocrisy has infected the social integrity of this country like I have not seen before in my lifetime, and may threaten the American way of life even more than the coronavirus pandemic. A sad irony is that many of the people who object most loudly to stay-at-home orders and mask mandates on the basis of their being infringements on their civil rights as Americans see no contradiction when they demand that the government enact a law that would deprive a woman of sovereignty over her own body.

On the day that the result of the recent presidential election was called I authored a brief reflection on the significance of the event and shared it openly. In one part I referred to the current president as a “malignant narcissist” and otherwise cast him in an unflattering light. Most readers who responded agreed with my assessment. There was a little push-back, however, mostly from people who mistakenly assumed from my remarks that I was a fan of his opponent in the race. The fact that “narcissist” is not a word that appears in a dictionary, much less a personal noun in the way that I used it, was not among the objections.

  Anyway, I do regret applying the term in the way that I did. No person should be labeled with the name of their illness or disability as if it is who they are, no matter who they are, and even when that’s the way it seems.

  Once upon a time when I was a much younger man and quite naive in some respects, I befriended someone who suffered from malignant narcissism, a man by the name of Charlie Manson. Being too inexperienced back in those days to apprehend my own human frailties, much less the complex psychology of a man who had been damaged as much as Manson had, I couldn’t see the danger he posed to everyone in his sphere of influence. I continue to pay a heavy price for the failure of discerning judgement that allowed that man to be any part of my life.

  From hard-knocks experience, I developed an acute sensitivity that allows me to detect that particularly toxic form of narcissism whenever I encounter someone who is possessed by the trait. Though only a small minority, such people are a feature of the prison landscape. One is wise to be on guard when in their vicinity.

  It seems to me that some people may be born with a defect that exhibits as that form of malignancy, but I think in most cases it manifests when a child’s innate desire to love and be loved is crushed by one or more adults in the child’s early life. Donald Trump’s father, who is said to have been a notorious predatory slum lord, no doubt subjected young Donald to brutish treatment, if only love denied.

  Based on what I have seen and experienced, malignant narcissism is a kind of immoral self-delusion. Those suffering from it are typically willing to sacrifice without compunction the well-being of anyone and everyone on the altar of what they perceive is the image of themselves in the eyes of others. To one who has not known love and doesn’t know what genuine love looks like, the trappings of popularity, adoration, and devoted loyalty will do. Such people are driven only by what they believe best serves the interests of number one, without any detectable suggestion of regret, there being no true self-awareness to raise the specter of moral dilemma. An all-consuming egocentricity of this sort is the sanctuary of one who is incredibly lonely, a loneliness often hidden behind a veneer of bravado or hostility.

  Many years ago something like a grub crawled into the space where Donald Trump’s heart should have been, and it squirms around in there to this day.

  While I don’t really want to alarm anyone, it might be of some value to take note that Donald Trump has a whole lot more followers than Charlie ever dreamed about having. And they’ve got a ton of guns.

A man, a father, a loved and respected member of his community, is being slowly executed by asphyxiation on a street in Minneapolis. His clean white t-shirt has picked up dirt from the asphalt where he lays in the shadow of a police cruiser. The city policeman seems almost nonchalant as he kneels over the man, pressing down hard on his knee to suppress the big man’s struggles; he is following his training, after all, employing a procedure prescribed for dealing with an uncooperative individual who meets a certain suspect profile. The officer ignores the pleas for mercy, those of the big man as well as those of some onlookers, including a fellow officer. The man knows he is about to die; he begs for someone nearby to relay a last message of love and regret to his mother. The knee on his throat presses down harder, closing his windpipe, and, after almost nine long minutes, the big man dies. The cell phone video goes black.

  Mark me now, I have seen some bad shit in my days on this earth. My life is that kind of puzzle. Even so, not much comes to mind as dreadful and horrifying as witnessing the slaying of George Floyd in that bystander’s film on my little prison television.

  President Trump’s response? Pretty much zilch. If that grub in his chest wriggled at all it was not so as anyone else could tell.

  Whatever may be the final determination in the killing of George Floyd, it certainly looked to all the world like the modern equivalent of a lynching. And it followed a long series of killings of people of color that bore the markings of being racially motivated, going back years, decades, centuries. What made the killing of Floyd so profoundly different was the compelling film, and the way the internet made it possible for people all over the world to see it. The cry for justice continues to resound.

  After weeks of nearly constant protest marches and demonstrations that brought together people of every age and skin complexion, to raise a cry, in the midst of a global plague, for an end to the abuses of a derelict criminal justice system, Trump finally makes a statement in response to the concerns of the populace. Only obliquely, though, in typical Trumpian fashion, framing a response he believes will promote his image as a tough guy in the minds of voters, while obscuring the glaring social inequities troubling the national conscience with yet another calculated misdirection.

  A slumbering giant has awakened and is demanding equity in opportunity and justice under the law, with an end to the violence brought by law enforcement into the communities of people of color. And all President Trump can think to do is puff out his chest and toss insults at the giant. A fool fails to rise to the moment. When what we need is some leadership with a heart, what we get instead is a stunt empty of purpose or meaning.

  It is June 1st, 2020. A loud, somewhat raucous but peaceful demonstration is underway in Lafayette Square, near the White House. The POTUS stands at his bully pulpit in the Rose Garden and blathers some inane rhetoric about how he is the law-and-order president, and that he’s going to bring the might of US law enforcement down on the heads of rioters and looters who threaten the American way of life. And then, as a demonstration of his intention, with a phalanx of federal police and military personnel to clear his path of protesters, Trump crashes the BLM protest demonstration in Lafayette Square so he can get a photograph of himself taken with a Bible he has never opened in front of a church he has never entered.

One of the more indelible moments in the video of this spectacle is an extended shot of an elderly white man, one of the protesters, brutally knocked to the ground by the police escort in their rush to clear the path for Trump. He was left lying there, flat on his back on the concrete pavement, his head split open, bleeding out of his ears. I don’t recall any mention of that man’s name.

The election is done. Not done, however, is all the drama over the result, which is likely to linger for some time. Everyone, if only on a deep level some people are unwilling to acknowledge, knows that the election was fair and the result accurate. Those who believed that Trump was going to be their conquering hero and deliver on his empty promises to bring their old jobs back and keep the darkies out of the country may want to believe that the election was rigged, and the presidency stolen. Honestly, I feel for them all. The political elites in Washington have ignored their plight and their needs for far too long. Nevertheless, the people have spoken. A significant majority, including many republicans, acted to assert that demagoguery in the office of the Presidency is not a good look for the nation. Otherwise, the winner in the election is divided government.

  Looks like we’re not going to be able to expect a whole lot of help from that quarter. The challenges people in this nation and the world are facing are not insurmountable, but many of them are massive. We need help from the people who are elected into offices to provide that help, yet it seems that when all those political folks get together in Washington all they can do for the most part is bicker over which side has the best political philosophy, and jockey for position in preparation for the next election cycle. It seems that no one is actually doing any real listening, each politician only waiting for their next turn to do the talking. Those of us down here in middle earth have been disappointed so many times!

  This nation was founded as a democratic republic. How did we get to the place where it’s become republicanism versus democracy? Where are “We the people ...” in all this?

  The two-party system in its current incarnation is so dysfunctional, so mired in power struggle for its own sake, that it’s no longer able to serve the people. All the energy, for the most part, gets spent leapfrogging from one election cycle to the next, with dark money determining outcomes.

  But what do I know? I’m just a guy in prison who has never voted in his life (though I would if I could), and who didn’t pay much attention to what happens in the political arena, tracking what happened in that world with one ear and sidelong glances, until I saw a guy I knew to be deadly dangerous elected into office as President. That got my attention. Now that I’ve invested a good deal of time in watching the goings on in Washington much more closely for a while, I can see the real danger that ineffective government poses to the well-being of America. And now that I see it, I find that I am not comfortable being complacent about what is happening in the political world. For what value there may be in sharing what I’m seeing from my low vantage, here you are.

*                     *                    *

We’re living in a burning house, folks. The writing of my reflections on the past year and my thoughts looking ahead had to be put on pause for a bit, my process having been rudely interrupted by yet another Trump-instigated drama. The events of 2020 are literally bleeding into 2021. The Trump Presidency is like an unwelcome gift that just keeps on giving.

  A little over a week ago a friend gave me a heads up, tipping me off that a new wrinkle in the fabric of American society was developing in the nation’s capital. Ordinarily I never turn on my television during the day. There’s only so much pop culture a guy can take before something like a bout with depression sets in, so I usually limit my television watching to evenings only. Significant world events are the rare exception.

  I turned on the tube and watched as the nightmarish events at the US Capitol Building began to violently unfold, learning only later that Donald Trump was doing precisely the same thing at precisely the same time. Not since the days of MAD and the Vietnam conflict during the Cold War era have I felt less proud to be an American.

  When I first tuned in the scene that greeted me was that of a hostile horde of white-complexioned people converging on the central edifice of our American democracy, like a mob of angry villagers hot on the heels of Doktor Frankenstein’s monster. Only this was not an old black and white movie; it was an ugly horror show in hi-res living color, and the mob was not carrying torches and pitchforks; they were wearing apparel and carrying banners and flags emblematic of the cult of Trump. Many in the mob were waving signs saying “Stop The Steal” or messages with a similar meaning.

  A couple of the rioters were scaling the walls of the Capitol Building freestyle, which seemed especially odd since there were plenty of staircases nearby. And as time went on most of the climbers seemed to get stuck in place, not going up or down but only clinging to the walls like weird ornaments. Stranger still, there was no evidence in sight of police or military personnel for quite some time. It baffled me why it took such a long time for law enforcement to bring the rioting under control and clear the grounds of the would-be revolutionaries.

  Way back in the day I used to think of myself as a revolutionary. What I saw on January 6th bore little resemblance to what I imagined the revolution would look like in those long ago days.

  The scenes filmed inside the Capitol Building, shot with cell phones, reveal people who have been made mad by years of a steady diet of poisonous rhetoric. Insurgency is too polite a word, and sedition too sensible a word for what was taking place in those hallowed halls. It was a rape of America by some of its own citizens. Rampaging lunatics in an asylum smearing their feces on the walls and decorations to express outrage over the conditions of their confinement. Juvenile delinquents on a vandalism spree, trashing the local high school, indiscriminately breaking up furniture and ripping papers, stealing a few objects to keep as mementos. These are the impressions one is left with after watching the amateur films that will surely remain a centerpiece of the historical record of this disgraceful episode from here on.

  The efforts of the Capitol Police and the Washington Metro Police to hold the line on the mob were impressive. The police personnel who were on site on the Capitol Building grounds when the siege began, though uncharacteristically outnumbered by a factor of many to one, comported themselves with professionalism and valor in the face of hundreds of maddog zealots intent on doing great bodily harm, or worse, to the Vice President and members of Congress. They stood fast and did what was possible to mitigate the situation and protect the lawmakers, all the while taking a lot of vocal and physical abuse. Some were injured, and one cop subsequently died from his injuries.

  Doubtless some of the police officers in the line of defense had voted for Trump, and may have struggled with some moral dilemmas during the riot. Most if not all did their jobs regardless. Insurgents with connections to the military and law enforcement notwithstanding, of course. The following day it was reported, with few details, that one of the cops on site during the uprising had taken his own life.

Newscasters frequently cut away to video flash-backs of the speech Trump gave to his supporters just prior the assault on the institution of our republic. Like a typical wily mob boss, Trump did not specifically tell his hit squad to storm the Capitol Building. He will claim that all of his remarks were perfectly fine and innocent, that it’s not his fault if some of the people in the crowd took some of his statements the wrong way. His lawyers and the most mendacious of Republicans in Congress will use this rationale to defend Trump against accusations of inciting the throng to engage in seditious acts.

  Deny deny deny, Trump’s fall-back position in every instance when he’s been caught in the act of behaving badly. Lie lie lie, like a small boy with chocolate smeared all around his mouth who swears he didn’t eat the candy bar.

  The truth is obvious: President Trump stood in front of a crowd of people already twitchy with nervous fervor, like a weapon loaded and cocked, primed by months of being fed the bogus narrative of a fraudulent election, and gave a rabble-rousing speech exhorting his followers to go up to the Capitol Building and demand that his VP alter the count of electoral college votes in his favor. He implored them to disrupt the process of affirming the vote tally concurrently under way, admonishing them that they couldn’t succeed if they were weak, saying they needed to “fight like hell” to take their country back from those he claimed had stolen the election from him. Call it what you will, the truth is that Trump deliberately poured gasoline onto a fire he had been stoking since before the votes were even cast.

  The President of the United States of America has the duty to uphold the oath of the office, to stand for truth and justice, adhere policy to the Constitution, and protect the country from all threats, foreign or domestic. Trump’s speech on January 6th did precisely the opposite. Exhorting a mob already lathered-up to near-hysteria to commit seditious acts is in itself an act of sedition, marginally veiled by a cunning speech-writer to allow the possibility of an arguable way out. Trump’s last acts as a sitting President are so disgraceful and repugnant that disgust gets in the way of finding the right words to describe a response.

  Trump’s own failures as President and his rhetorical terrorism indict him; yet there are Republicans in Congress who will not, much less convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors. Some of the people who have enabled their Commander in Extremis over the past four years bear at least equal culpability for how effective Trump has been in brutalizing the nation by degrading the trust in democracy that holds it together. Dignifying the betrayal of America in pursuit of an agenda that is inconsistent with the needs of the nation is to be as complicit as the titular face of the betrayal. And in consequence, to be subject to reaping the reckoning that such betrayal will inevitably bring.

  I wonder how long it will take for the majority of Trump’s supporters to wake up to a dawning awareness that they’ve been duped. It may take awhile because no one likes to admit they’ve been suckered. Some cracks are already showing, though, as it’s evident that the truth has already begun to sink in for some.

  During that reprehensible little pep talk he gave to his supporters just prior to the siege on the Capitol Building, Trump made assurances that he would accompany them on their mission, standing with them during that critical confrontation. Of course he lied again. Bravado and bombast are often a cloak for cowardice. Ducking back into the White House, Trump bunkered down to watch the events unfold on television (anyone who’s been paying attention will know it’s only real for him when he sees it on the tube). A couple of days later he would betray his followers again, in a televised statement from the White House, telling those who had taken his cause to the Capitol Building on the 6th that they do not represent America. (ouch!)

The insurrection, if that’s what we’re calling it, must surely go down in history as the world’s most inept attempted coup. While it was in progress it seemed that there was a kind of interrogatory taking place, a collective introspection of the American conscience, a questioning look at the moral crisis this event represents in the national psyche. The seemingly sleepy response by law enforcement, from the perspective of watching what was going on outside of the Capitol Building, gave us all a long lingering look at what happens to people when the government fails to do some of the most basic things it was created for, and fails to adequately address the real concerns and dire needs of large portions of the country’s population.

  Setting aside for the moment those malicious hard cases who scooted in under the camouflage of the Trump parade, most of the people who joined the horde storming the Capitol Building that day were not domestic terrorists. By and large they were a mob of confused, justifiably angry people who had been misled by the lies of a blowhard they revered, and who got swept up in the crowd madness. The same dynamic is at work in prison riots, which are not outside of my personal experience. Peer pressure often plays a role in this sort of thing. In a large assemblage of people caught up in the moment and under the influence of anger and fear a kind of crowd fever can take over, and people get involved in things that are not necessarily representative of their normal moral identities. Yeah, a bunch of impressionable dumbasses, that’s another way to put it. Consequences from a legal standpoint are likely to vary. The price of involvement for some will not be cheap.

  There was a steady stream of Trump supporters appearing on the scene at the Capitol Building for some time. The smarter ones, when they saw what was happening up on the walls and landings, turned around, put their flags and signs over their shoulders, and walked back in the direction they had come from. Others were more determined to fulfill their fantasies of being in a revolution, and charged ahead. Some of them climbed the walls, some taunted police with insults, some went into the building after some doors and windows were breached so they could take selfies to use for bragging rights on their social media pages. Poor gullible dumbasses! Imprisonment is a high price to pay for such meager returns.

  Even from my faraway vantage it seemed to me that the garden variety Trump supporters were being used like cannon fodder in a more sinister scheme than they understood they were participating in. Some very bad actors with some very bad intentions were prime movers in what took place at the Capitol Building: people who believe that Timothy McVeigh was a patriotic hero; people who are being radicalized from the pulpits of some evangelical churches in rural communities; people who believe that fomenting a race war is the only way to push back on what they see as the browning of the country in order to preserve white majority rule; people who are enthralled by visions of an ascendency of chaos in the world.

  I know these types; I can spot them a mile away. They have been stuck inside of propaganda-driven echo chambers for so long they have self-talked themselves into believing in alternate realities built of elaborate fictions. Ask them what the world will look like if they succeed in getting what they want and their faces go blank. A foggy, amorphous aspiration at best; no clear vision of something better on the other side, no real plan, no goal beyond the opportunity to feel the fleeting power of using their guns on people they’ve been warped into believing are either a threat or inferior, or both.

  Trump did not create these groups, nor do many in them consider him to be anything like a leader. It’s more a case of mutual exploitation, an alliance of convenience. Self-obsession makes for strange bed fellows.

  With the glamour spell broken and Trump revealed as a tin god, now mostly impotent, both his garden variety supporters and the opportunist hard cases who have been exploiting his platform will, each in their own ways, be floundering. The latter have always been lurking in the fringes, and if enough of the country’s population can manage to get cleaner information and move toward the common good, those factions will retreat to whence they came. I worry most for the regular folks whose significant needs have largely been ignored by Washington, making them easy marks for the empty promises of a self-styled savior who claimed he could fix all their problems if only they would vote for him. I worry that in the absence of the demagogue they might just return to their Fox News/Rush Limbaugh echo chambers and get seduced again by fear mongering and conspiracy constructs, leading to another dead end of false hope.

For Trump, you see, was never the real problem. He was a symptom, like itchy bumps are a symptom of chicken pox. As far as anyone can tell, the root of the despair he played on to con his way to enough votes to win the presidency in 2016 persists undiminished by anything he did during his four years in the office. The coal and steel and manufacturing jobs he promised to bring back to rural American communities did not come back. The promised infrastructure projects that were supposed to bring so many new jobs did not manifest. It appears the only building project that actually resulted in something being built is a part of a wall on the southern border, and in fact it only replaced some of the border wall that had already been there. This will remain, I suppose, a lasting monument to the xenophobic egoism that gave rise to it.

  The world moved on and left a lot of people in America behind, and essentially cast aside, their plight largely overlooked by media agencies. Out of sight, out of mind, they were left to figure things out on their own. So many people living in digital deserts exacerbates the disconnect, limiting access to unfiltered information and education opportunities. A recipe for social disintegration on a major scale.

  None of this should come as a surprise to the bigshots in Washington, not if they’ve been paying attention. The crisis has been in development for decades. It’s an old story: With the regularity of evolving progress come new and better technologies that make earlier technologies obsolete. Artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly making manufacturing more streamlined, economical, and therefore more profitable to manufacturing companies and their financial holders. Added to this is that America’s affection for inexpensive imported products has resulted in many domestic companies sending their manufacturing to countries with developing economies, so they could compete in the domestic market.

  Steam power was replaced with electricity and the internal combustion engine, opening up tremendous new markets, and the need for the work force to adapt and learn new skill sets to keep pace. Technological advancement and changing market forces will tend to displace working people from their livelihoods. Where the failure in the free market system occurs is when there are money-grubbing corporations treating displaced workers as expendable casualties of doing business, as if they were not actually people, and the government ‘for the people’ lets them get away with it. Only in the world of organized crime is it said: Nothing personal; it’s only business.

On the one hand, it’s a good thing we have new technologies to take us beyond reliance on industrial age technologies that are largely dependent on fossil fuels. This may help us to avoid the fate of making the planet too hot and stormy for our species to continue living on it.

  On the other hand, as the industrial era jobs have dried up during the rise of the digital age, so too did the livelihoods of millions of people who have depended on those jobs to provide for their families, and to give meaning and purpose to their lives. It’s truly a shame that we lack a leadership in Congress that makes a concerted effort to keep the working people from being stranded and left behind, and makes it a priority to keep them whole and contributing to the nation’s vitality as the job market adapts to progress.

  This is a systemic failure of good governance in this country. It is a failure to properly evaluate developing trends in industries and markets, to make preparations and take steps to head off catastrophic social collapse within affected communities. Consequently, the underlying conditions that have engendered a massive outbreak of hopelessness in many of the nation’s communities continue to fester unabated. These communities are in dire need of some solutions that get to the root causes of the despair.

  While there has been some lip-service and a little bit of action brought to bear on the symptomatic crises – pervasive mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism, suicides – that have so mortified affected communities, and some grass roots efforts to upgrade skill sets within their work forces, efforts to address the underlying causes of community disintegration have been minimal and patchy at best. This is not the sort of problem that can be solved by throwing food stamps at it.

  So that’s how it happened. When local economies collapse and the government fails to take heed and step up to provide some meaningful support, you suffer, and you blame government. You as a man or woman living in such a marginalized community, having lost options for making a satisfactory living, suffering with feelings of hopelessness and despair, and trying to drown the misery in drink or drugs doesn’t really help, and you just keep getting more and more angry about the conditions you’re trying to survive in, well, that makes you vulnerable, susceptible to someone prone to shady dealings. Along comes a chubby charlatan selling his own special brew of MAGA snake oil. Step right up, folks, he says, I’ve got what you need right here, just the thing to ease your pain and cure what ails you. My special potion is the only thing that can fix you, just one vote a bottle. So if you’re desperate enough, you might be willing to risk a vote to take the guy up on the remedy he’s offering.

  Now we’ve all had the benefit of seeing what happens when things are allowed to get so bad that a snake oil salesman is able to get his little mitts on the reins of government.

Yes, it was heartbreaking to watch the cradle of democracy in this country be debased by an angry mob. People jacked up on MAGA juice, a circus of disgrace, sickening to witness.

  And yet, was it all that surprising? Some would argue that it was almost inevitable, that we could have predicted just such an outcome given all that had preceded it in recent years. All the sniping and take-no-prisoners politics in Washington, the inability of Congress to rise above party loyalty to come together, to find some wiggle room for compromise, to act decisively when the need for action is so plainly visible ... I mean, it’s just tiresome. Congress could not have been more effective in enticing angry citizens to stage an attempted coup if they had actually planned it and sent out engraved invitations.

Again, as someone who has never voted, I claim no party affiliation. Generally speaking, it’s been good enough for me if Congress finds some way to work things out and get the job done. I don’t need to know all the little details. Unfortunately, Congress is broken. The dysfunction in Washington has forced me to pay more attention to government than I would ordinarily care to pay.

  The two party system is not my idea of a good time. I’m sure there are some very fine people on both sides, but put them all together in a room and it’s just a basket of deplorables. Robert’s Rules of Order keep the bickering between the two sides superficially polite, but in the end it’s still just petty bickering, with catch phrase sloganing as a politically correct form of name calling used ad nauseum to insult the opposing side and invalidate its position. Jockeying for position in the next election race has taken precedent over serving the public good.

  In these incredibly challenging times what we need more than anything else is leadership that has the ability to think and act creatively, to come up with innovative solutions to the problems we face. As an artist, a creative person by nature, I seek to align myself with people who have the ability and inclination to think and act creatively. What success I have had in this life has almost entirely come out of that type of relationship.

  The elected representatives we currently have in Washington, both parties combined, can’t seem to rub enough brain cells together between them to produce effectively innovative strategies to bring to the process of finding solutions to the kinds of problems we are facing in today’s world, where the solutions of yesteryear frequently won’t work. We are in great need of some fresh thinking in that very place where ideology so often gets in the way of actual ideas.

  As things stand, we have two political parties in perpetual loggerheads around issues of economics, equity, criminal justice, climate change, and other pressing concerns. The persistent log jams invariably arise out of the same tired arguments, often based on principles demonstrably outdated and invalid. Too often, policy is driven by paranoia, the misplaced belief that something of value will be lost if there is capitulation toward a position that veers from the traditional party narrative. There is an irrational presumption that, looking ahead to the next election, it’s safer to stick with the party line. Consequently, the machinery of government is rusted, frozen in place. Broken.

  Where is the courage to step out of line and do the right thing, when simply doing the right thing is clearly what is called for? What will it take for Washington to bring teamwork to the process of governance, to obtain the best available information and be ready to take bold, swift action to meet challenges that are already at the crisis point?

  Oh, yeah, now I remember. A couple of dinosaurs, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, are locked in a pissing contest, and we all have to wait for them to finish before we can begin to get anywhere – which is liable to take us beyond the foreseeable future, what with the enlarged prostates and all.

  Don’t get me wrong: both of the main political parties have valid points of view and precepts in their respective philosophies, and there are aspects of each of those philosophies that I tend to agree with. At this juncture, however, if I were forced to pick a side, Republican or Democrat, my brain would probably short-circuit and fry before I could arrive at a decision.

  Frankly, every time I hear Chuck Schumer talk I feel like curling up, pulling the bed covers over my head and going to sleep. Democratic senators have crippled themselves by choosing that man as leader, in my opinion. Pompous, self-righteous, always seeming to be wagging his shaming finger at Republicans. He stands on principle, and dies on that hill almost every time. Principle is a stance, not a strategy. Little wonder that Democrats get outfoxed by Republicans so much of the time, even when they hold both majorities in Congress.

  Democrats, by and large, have good intentions. And in this context what this brings to mind is an old saw about a road to somewhere being paved with those things. A philosophy that promotes a level playing field for all of Americans across ethnicity and culture and economic standing (a fairly recent adoption for the democratic platform as a whole, by the way) is admirable, and I believe it is mostly genuine, if somewhat immature. How to go about achieving these goals is where Democrats tend to fall short. Their strategies are typically blunt force, lacking in imagination and effective sales pitch language, and tend to require too much bureaucracy to implement. In consequence, most of the legislation introduced by Democrats crashes and burns against a stone wall of resistance from the other party. I wouldn’t know from real experience, but it must be frustrating to be a Democrat. The leadership’s tendency to blame failure on obstinacy by the opposing side is just a cop-out. Righteous indignation does not a strategy make.

  Sometimes I think that the only reason Democrats succeed in winning some elections is because so many Republicans have made themselves so disagreeable that most voters can’t stomach what they’ve come to stand for. Like last November when a significant percentage of voters turned out to say “Nope!” to a Trump re-election when not being wildly excited about the Biden/Harris ticket. And again in Georgia’s Senatorial run-off election when for many voters the main impetus to vote was to flip the Senate in order to pry McConnell’s cold petrified fingers from the tiller of the federal government.

  Once the party of Abe Lincoln and Ronnie Reagan, the Republican party of today has lost much of its former dignity. Traditionally, Republicans in government stood as a bulwark of resistance to unfettered government growth and fiscal irresponsibility, a sort of counter-balance to hold the line on attempts by progressive lawmakers to add too much well-meaning but unnecessary or repressive legislation to the books. There’s a good reason for this: Every new law or regulation requires an agency of cops to enforce it, adding another layer of bureaucracy to government. Once these policing agencies are created they tend to stay there, hidden from view, drawing paychecks, even after they have long since become obsolete. Republican conservatism brings balancing restraint to the process of governance to help the country to avoid winding up with a government that is too bloated, too costly to function efficiently, too restrictive for commerce to operate freely, and too much of a tax burden on the people.

  That is to say, this once was, in short, the traditional role of the party.

  Now we have a Republican party dominated by a collection of jokers who surely have Lincoln and Reagan tossing in their graves. Right, white, and tight, and proud of it, for whom working with Democrats in partnership for balanced governance is anathema. The party has been willing to embrace and enjoin an odious Administration in order to obtain endorsement for stacking the courts with the anti-abortion, pro-Christian, anti-egalitarian, pro-corporation judges they wanted. And to get Presidential buy-off on shifting even more of the tax burden onto the working class by giving a whopping tax cut to megabucks tycoons and corporations, who in turn, quid pro quo, supply dark money to fund wickedly conceived schemes to suppress Democratic participation in voting, and to pay for creating the attack ads used to demonize opposition election candidates.

  Very few Republicans in Congress have had the courage to stand up and publicly denounce the Administration for the steady stream of lies, half-truths and disinformation that came out of the White House during the Trump Presidency. Those who did were ostracized by their fellows for breaking with party solidarity, while those who may have agreed with the censure but lacked the courage to express their agreement turned their faces down to the papers in front of them and played dumb. Being in government to represent the people, and failing to speak out in the face of a pack of mistruths from the Executive Branch is dishonorable, and tantamount to being in collaboration with the source of the falsehoods.

  In recent years some of the best of the traditional conservatives in Washington have dropped out, resigning from their elective posts in disgust, rather than to compromise their integrity and professional ethics by staying in an office that requires them to violate their principles. They have chosen to forfeit their careers rather than to take part in what amounts to an orchestrated power grab to put all the levers of government solely and exclusively in the hands of an unscrupulous cadre of Republicans, leaving the progressive wing effectively routed from having any real influence in political decision-making.

  And it almost worked. Fortuitously, the political coup planned by no-mask MAGA-hat Republicans was foiled by a surprise attack on an exposed flank, and America dodged a bullet. Had that bullet struck its intended mark our democracy might have gone into a death spiral.

Someone who doesn’t have a dog in the fight has to be the one to say it: Donald Trump’s re-election was stolen. Not in the way that he and some of his supporters have claimed, though. The voting was fair and legal, and the tallies were accurate, as confirmed by every election monitor all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Nevertheless, there was a theft of some of the votes Trump had been counting on — and they were not stolen by dead people voting, or jiggered voting machines, or deep state aliens abducting ballots, or any of the other wacky conspiracy stories people like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Q. Bannon would have us believe. No, the diabolical schemes of Trumpist Republicans were thwarted by none other than the viral plague.

  This happened in two ways: Faced with the first real crisis of his time in office, the arrival on our shores of a deadly virus, Trump revealed himself to be thoroughly ill-suited to the job of being President. Anyone with one eye half-open, if one was willing to look at all, could plainly see that he was an incompetent fool who would happily risk the lives of the country’s entire population to stay in power. And secondly, in response to the pandemic, mail-in ballot voting was established in many places where that option had not been available, to allow citizens a method they could use to vote in safety. This emboldened many citizens to participate in the election who had previously been disenfranchised or discouraged from voting. Effectively, this did an end run around most of the meticulously planned gerrymandering and other voter suppression schemes employed by many Republican majority state legislatures. Turns out that Trump’s fears around mail-in ballot voting were justified. Ironically, things might have turned out better for him if he had told his supporters to use mail-in ballots instead of sowing so much distrust in that method of voting.

  The coronavirus pandemic may have inadvertently saved American democracy, for the time being at least, but that nasty plague has wrought too much death and devastation in the lives of families and communities, and too much damage to our economy to think of it in terms of silver linings. Even in the midst of utter catastrophe there might still be little bits of good luck to be found here and there.

The United States of America, the greatest nation in the world. That’s the reputation. Lately that reputation has been tarnished, and our dignity as a nation has taken some hits. This seems to speak to a need for all of us to make a discriminating assessment of who we are and who we want to be as a nation. Some of the challenges we’ve been dealing with might serve as an instrument for such an examination.

  The last four years of an Administration with Trump at the helm might be said to be the nation’s way of revealing how far we can stray from having a government of the people, for the people, by the people, and how easily we can drift away from the principles and core values that fortify its ability to guard, support and preserve the commonwealth.

  The coronavirus pandemic might be said to be nature’s way of exposing our human weaknesses, the chinks in our armor, the disparities and inequities in our social system that make some people more vulnerable than others. It has stripped away some of our assumptions and misconceptions, opening windows on some of our bad habits, delusions and complacency regarding the status quo within our society, and how some within it will put politics ahead of the well-being of people. Seeing ourselves naked, so to speak, with all of our vulnerabilities exposed, can be painful. Experiencing ourselves exposed in this way can also make us stronger, more insightful, more humble, and more appreciative of what is truly precious as we approach coming out on the other side of this pandemic. It’s not so much about looking on the brighter side; it’s about getting to a better place.

  Here, then, is a lens through which to focus in on that place of vulnerability. Ask yourself: Who am I? The pursuit of answering this single question will, I promise you, lead to all of the questions and answers worth knowing.

  What each of us brings to community individually will define the shape of the community collectively. It is the willingness to engage with one another in this conversation that will heal a hurting and confused nation.

*                     *                    *

There is a dog in the White House. Not just one dog, but two dogs! This to my mind signifies a Major step in the right direction.

Under circumstances that looked a lot like martial law, a Presidential Inauguration was somewhat nervously held dignifying a peaceful transfer of power despite a recalcitrant former head of state. With our new POTUS sworn in we can begin to breathe a little easier, even though an American is dying from CoVid-19 every few minutes as the pandemic continues to rage around the world, and there are still lots of grumblings in the Trump camp.

  With some coaxing from people who apparently have a working understanding of child psychology, the orange guy was enticed to leave the White House on the promise of a military ceremony honoring his time in office. I thought, Firing squad? Funny how an embarrassing thought can pop into one’s mind unbidden. But, no, the ceremony of pomp and circumstance turned out to be a length of red carpet leading out of the White House, and a helicopter ride taking him out of Washington.

  Most of us would prefer to be done with the guy, I’m guessing, but Nancy Pelosi is not yet done with Trump, who now goes down in the history books as a President twice impeached by the House. She has delivered the Articles Of Impeachment for a trial in the Senate for inciting sedition. I’m on the fence about Trump being tried in the Senate. Does he deserve it? To quote Koty Lee, one of my all-time favorite singing piano players, “Heck yeah!” But it’s doubtful that enough Republicans in the Senate have the cajones to convict out of fear of political repercussions from Trump supporters down the road. I don’t see the point of the time and expense and distraction of a trial when it’s likely to result in Trump getting another newspaper headline saying he’s been acquitted.

  My views on the matter are purely academic, it appears. Madame Speaker is fixated on giving Donald Trump a public spanking. What Nancy doesn’t seem to understand is that Donald likes that sort of thing. In his world, being twice impeached by Nancy Pelosi is a merit badge. Malignant narcissism, remember? A darling of the tabloids, Donald Trump doesn’t care if the focus on him is good, bad or ugly as long as the spotlight is on him. Turning off the spotlight and leaving it off is about the only thing that would be a real punishment to a guy like him.

  During his speech in the 2017 Presidential Inauguration ceremony, the freshly sworn-in President Donald J. Trump told a bewildered nation that he saw America’s outlook as bleak and grim, and predicted carnage in its future.

  Joseph Biden, in his Inaugural address, promised that he would be a President for all Americans, that he would always tell the American people what he knew to be true, and work to bring unity to a fractured nation.

  May it come to be proven that Joe Biden is as true to his words as Donald Trump was to his.

  As things stand, the orange guy is out, and dogs are in the White House. This makes me smile. On both counts.

What my part in all this might be is anyone’s guess. Having been in prison for such a long time (if I said how long it wouldn’t mean much because so few people have points of reference enough to be able to imagine the effects) makes it difficult for me to know how I fit in under the present circumstances. I had to work very hard to preserve my sanity, and to avoid becoming so filled with rage and cynicism that I turned myself into a bitter old man of little value to anyone. My perspective, therefore, is something of a rarity. Through this running commentary it may be that I can bring some value to people who, like me, have been struggling to gain some clarity around where we are in the world today, trying to figure out how to fit their piece into the puzzle, and find a way to move forward that produces something beneficial.

  To be sure, I could list decades’ worth of grievances as reasons why I resent and despise the US government’s justice system. Although the prison populations in this country are predominately comprised of blacks, latinos, and other people of color, once a resident of the system everyone gets the same treatment. No exaggeration: I have seen, and felt, some of the worst the criminal justice system can dish out. And I am only one of millions of people who have been hand-cuffed to draconian prison sentences and shoved inside to feed the insatiable appetite of the prison industrial complex machinery. A national disgrace, that is, the way human beings are chewed up and spit out the other side as broken people, or dead bodies. Nonetheless, God help me, I love this country and everyone who lives in it, the whole crazy mixed-up bunch of us.

  The government in this country, at state and federal levels, has a good many shortcomings, more lately than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. The people themselves, however; that’s a different story. The real assets of this nation are not its abundance of material resources but in the living blood and spirit of its people in all of our diversity. Some of those holding political office don’t get this. They want to pick and choose, favoring some over others. This weakens us as a nation.

  What our elected officials need to understand, and truly what all of us need to understand as we move forward, is that the full potential contained in the people, in the body politic, can be realized only when there is equal participation by all the people of every stripe, gender, cultural history, ethnic features, social standing, and economic worth. This is the true power of our nation. Some will say that the power is in the US Constitution. It is an important document, one that describes the organization of principles and definitions to help guide the formation of a working nation, but in the end it is still only ink on parchment. The real power is the people, and in the people, the talents and skills that each of us brings to community and enterprise.

  Who among us failed to recognize that “Make America Great Again” was a dog whistle? Its obvious message: that we were all supposed to sign on to take the country back to some fantasy yesteryear when America was better than it is today. The best I can figure it to mean, what with everything that was packaged with the slogan, was a return to something like the era of manifest destiny and the second industrial revolution, with the whitest and richest men among us holding sway over all. I fail to see what’s so great or attractive about that sort of unimaginative world view. Who wants to buy a ticket to ride on a train to Backwards?

  On his last day in the office of Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo posted a tweet saying, “Multiculturalism, all the -isms – they’re not who America is.” And I thought, Huh?! What alternate America does that guy live in? And where does he think he got his last name from? Seems to me that Mr. Pompeo would be well-served if he talked this view over with some of my Native brothers and sisters. I’m sure they would be happy to explain a thing or two about who America is with respect to culture.

  Until I read Pompeo’s tweet I was unaware that multicultural was an ism. Having been very nearly my entire adult life in a world where my skin complexion puts me in a minority qualifies me to say: It’s better that than racism. We’ve all had just about enough of that fallacy. So much precious time and exhaustive efforts have been squandered in the perpetuation of falsehoods used to deprive American citizens of fair treatment, equity of opportunity and equal justice under the law. It’s wearisome.

  Look, I have been a musician for almost my entire life, and over the years I have played in numerous bands, and with some truly great musicians. If there is anything I know for sure it is that talent comes in all colors, sizes and shapes. Throughout my life, well beyond my work in music, it’s been proven to me time and again that talent and skill and imagination are readily found in people of every cultural background. No one gender, culture, ethnicity or age group has a corner on the market when it comes to this sort of thing. To limit who is heard on the basis of how much melanin a person has in his or her skin, or in what part of the world was their ancestral home, or any other similarly contrived and distracting consideration, is literally self-defeating. Applying any arbitrary bias to limit the diversity of human resources brought to the challenges of building community and finding some solutions to our problems risks the possibility of misplacing that one single idea or element that could bring a great achievement, or even our salvation as a species.

How about we come to an agreement to make America America, and have it done. What I would like to see is a forward-looking vision for this nation and, by extension, the world. Give us the Imagineers! Now more than ever before we need the creatives to step up and show us visions of what a post-industrial era world might look like, and how all the parts might function together harmoniously.

  So here’s a full-throated call to the innovators, the artists, the poets, the daydreamers, the mystics, the mythologists, the learned elders, the inventors, the hot-rodding customizers, the ingenious entrepreneurs, the agile-minded economists, the idealists, the pragmatists, the builders, the judicious demolitionists, the conjurers, the green-thumbed gardeners, the curious botanists, the intrepid scientists, the science fictionists, the stalwart explorers, the wordsmiths, the multilingualists, the storytellers, the crafty shop wrights, the organic digitechnologists, the fuzzy logisticians, the fanciful architects, the extraordinary conceptualists, the enthusiasm motivators, and the tactical juxtaposers. All hands on deck!

  The canvas is blank; show us what you’ve got. Let’s see some imaginings of a way cooler world.

The disruption in our lives brought by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a variety of adaptations and some remarkable innovations. Some of them are likely to remain with us after the pandemic is behind us. A good many of them are positive developments, worth hanging onto. There are some worrying social symptoms as well, like kids in difficult family situations, people with substance dependency issues, and no doubt a lot of people have been eating too much, sleeping too much, playing video games obsessively, and grappling with bouts of depression. There will be some adjustments to make during the recovery period once the contagion has been tamped down.

  Over these past many months I’ve been humbled by some of the ways people have responded to the pandemic. So many people have suffered the loss of friends and kin, and I feel their grief, even as I feel an abundance of gratitude for the bravery and selflessness of those who have risked their own well-being to help the afflicted and protect the rest of us. Often I have been moved to tears by the acts of selflessness that have been on display, and been inspired by the myriad ways artists and regular folks have found or invented to connect with and support one another during a time when staying physically apart is a necessity to keep each other safe. I love seeing how many people have been looking out for their neighbors, or stepping up to support the homeless, or to help families who have run out of food, while observing the restraints imposed by lockdown. My faith in the innate goodness of humanity has been elevated even as my confidence in the leadership of the federal government has been deeply shaken.

  Oh, there will be assistance through the Treasury to help the country scrape by until the pandemic is over. Beyond that, there will be a need for the people to be more resourceful than ever. That’s as it should be. The founding fathers never intended the federal government to be a Big Daddy Warbucks, except when very significant needs arise. Top-down government is not what we want — that way lies autocracy. That said, a national health care system seems to make a lot more sense now, considering the haphazard response to the coronavirus outbreak in general, and the patchy, uncoordinated process of getting people vaccinated across the country. Beyond that, however, whatever creative ideas and projects the Imagineers come up with will mostly have to rely on bottom-up action plans.

So, now that we’ve seen the pitiful end of the manifest destiny era, and the old standard for western civilization has died with an embarrassing whimper, what comes next? I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine. As I said at the beginning of this, I’m out of prophetic pronouncements.

  There has been a lot of talk about how we all want to get back to normal. Having been locked in a cell 24/7 for the better part of three months, with only a few brief opportunities to get out for a shower, I can certainly relate to the need to have some normal social interactions with other people. We all miss that. Humans are social creatures, after all. However, speaking strictly for myself, I sincerely hope that the normal we return to after we defeat the virus is one significantly different from the old normal we knew prior to the pandemic. A normal that feels brighter, fresh, outside the box, and more equitable. That would be nice.

  I am feeling hopeful but not particularly optimistic. Despite having to sort through some discouraging set-backs, I would not say that I feel pessimistic. My once half-full cup has been drained, and now it’s just empty, containing only potential and expectation, open and waiting for whatever may arise in the world from this point.

As I raise my empty cup to you in salute, I wish you health and safety on your journey. May you be fortified by strength and courage as you face the mystery ahead. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others. Be fearless, and be fierce.

  Expect the unexpected.

Bobby BeauSoleil

Crossroads 2020-21

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Viola Bonaldi interviews Bobby BeauSoleil

This is the raw interview Viola Bonaldi did with Bobby BeauSoleil in the summer of 2018. Viola Bonaldi wrote an article incorporating the raw material below for Salmuria.

You can read the English version here: https://salmuria.it/emailing-with-bobby-beausoleil/

… Or if your first language happens to be Italian, read it here: https://salmuria.it/corrispondenza-con-bobby-beausoleil/

How did your passion for art — first music and then visual art — come about? Do you remember a specific moment or an episode that enlightened you? Did the Sixties atmosphere play an important role?

As far as I can tell, I mean, to the best of my recollection, I already had a passion to express myself in creative ways when I was born. According to what my mother told me later, about the time I took my first steps I was playing her pots and pans and making drawings on the walls of the house.

Honestly, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel like I had something to say in the arts. I believe this is the case with most if not all artists. For some a passionate desire to express in the arts may lay dormant for a time, and then suddenly something happens that triggers the calling, awakening the latent artist within. In my case it seems that I was born turned on. I didn’t need the social explosion that happened in the 1960s to bring the creative urges out of me, but it did provide a playground for them, and sometimes I found inspiration in the passions of people I encountered during that period.

When you haunted the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles you were known as “Cupid”, the archaic Roman primordial god of love, because of the way girls liked to be around you, a young, vibrant, beautiful, multicolored artist. From that capricious god you eventually turned yourself into “Lucifer”, the “angel of light”, fallen from Paradise as a consequence of his pride. Your life is largely connected to archaic myths, and this is often reflected in your work as an artist, both musically and visually, which is full of esoteric symbolism. Now, more than four decades after your work on Lucifer Rising, who are you? Lucifer, Cupid, or some other “creature”? And how do you explain your interest in the arcane?

Wow! Big questions! Well, first of all, I have never pretended to actually be any “creature”, as you put it, that I’ve been associated with. I am just me, an innately nameless soul. As an artist, I have sometimes used my own physical being as a canvas, willingly adopting personas from mythology that others have seen in me. My parents gave me a name at birth and I have been happy to be that person most of the time. Occasionally I have taken on the personifications of archetypes from myth as a way of allowing them to live for a brief time, and in a limited way, in the world of the mundane. There are, by the way, some common traits between Cupid and Lucifer. Both of these mythological beings are imagined as angelic, both known to have a naughty streak, to be creatively rebellious, and both are associated with love. I can think of far worse things to be known for expressing in the world.

What attracts me to the myths is the wealth of story and allegory that can enrich our larger capacity for understanding. Myths are often used as a tool for deepening cultural identity, and to give a hand up by way of providing context and instruction to those who aspire to higher truths. And mythology is an artform that can inspire new art, and thus myths can be alive and continue to grow and influence. As for other arcane interests, I have found little of any real substance in the so-called “dark arts” or silly practices like devil worship. However, as a mystic seeker I have found that treasures are often hidden in dark places. Following a shadow to its source will invariably lead one to the light.

You write that your works are rarely borne out of direct observations of the natural world, from the perception of real things, but come instead from your own mental reinterpretations and from the world of dreams. Is this a consequence of your limited conditions in terms of the space you live it? What is your process for drawing subjects from your recurrent dreams?

Certainly, there are no beautiful vistas to be seen through the dirty windows of the place where I live. I can see moving images from nature in photographs and films, and sometimes these inspire me to produce a visual interpretation. For the most part, though, I tend to see the beauty of nature as paintings made by God, ever changing in the light of consciousness, awesomely inspired and breathtaking, far beyond the capabilities of any human artist to do them justice. Rather than producing poor imitations of the moving paintings created by God, my natural inclination is to make a few humble additions to God’s creation, as one of the forces of nature.

So, for the most part, I draw inspiration from my unfettered and fertile imagination. You can fly in your dreams, right? What can be seen, imagined or experienced is not limited to what is possible in the physical world in some states of mind. I cultivate some of these states of mind, such as lucid dreaming, as a source for concepts that may be made manifest in the physical world through my arts. This works for visual imagery and for music as well, and even sometimes for written words, like poetry. In the vast territories of dreams especially — both daydreams and the kind that happen during sleep — the mind plays freely, in safety, amorphously creating odd mash-ups, evolving patterns, astonishingly wonderous sounds. Much of my work is an attempt to bring these experiences into the physical realm, or at least to hint at them.

What does a young man think when he is sent to death row? You couldn’t play an instrument or have contact with other people, right?

When I arrived on San Quentin’s death row in 1970 I was a total wreck, broken and shattered, far more devastated than I ever let anyone know during that period. As difficult as it was, in some ways that 26 months I was on death row was a blessing. I needed that time alone to grapple with my conscience, to fully face what I had done head-on, to begin to learn how to think things through and begin the process of accepting responsibility for how I was going to deal with the consequences of my actions and eventually find a way to redeem myself. It was a tall order, one that seemed utterly insurmountable at the time. Think of a complicated picture-puzzle with about a million pieces.

Having a guitar was not allowed on death row, like you say, but I could get a little manual typewriter and a few pencils and sketch paper. Writing and drawing helped me to focus on my inner world and begin the process of putting the pieces of myself back together.          

Where did you learn to create musical instruments? How did you manage to do that in prison?

Finding ways of making new or different kinds of sounds has been a fascination for me since I was a small boy. The first time I built a musical instrument was when I was about 8 years old. It was a contraption I called a “jazz band” — basically a percussion instrument made out of a wooden crate, with a variety of found objects like tin cans, pie plates, glass jars, spoons and whatnot nailed or attached to the crate in some way. I made a lot of noise on that thing, beating on it with sticks. A couple of years later I made an electric guitar — or rather, something that looked like a guitar I had seen in the window of a music store — in the workshop class at my school. It didn’t work, but from that experience I learned a lot about what is needed to make one that would. I have customized, or “hot-rodded”, every guitar I’ve had since, and built a few guitars from scratch.

In the mid-1960s, when I was putting together a band that would become known as The Orkustra, I was faced with the challenge of figuring out how to go about electrically amplifying different kinds of woodwinds and stringed instruments. This was a necessary step in fulfilling my desire to assemble the first electric orchestra. This experience became invaluable ten years later when I took on the Lucifer Rising soundtrack project. After I was given a permission from the warden at the prison to produce recordings for the project I successfully sought an additional permission to build some of the instruments I would need in the prison handicraft shop. I was allowed to build several guitars and keyboard instruments, and to experiment with music electronics and synthesizer design. This led to the invention and development of some instrument innovations.

Things have changed in prisons since then, with most of the prison handicraft programs having been shut down. Though I’m not able to build instruments at present, I still manage to find ways to hot-rod guitars. Fortunately, the technical skills I acquired earlier opened doors to my being in prison jobs that have given me access to advanced tools for producing work in various media, including video and sound design. I have been blessed with some unusual opportunities to employ my abilities in ways that are helpful and beneficial to others. Despite the imprisonment, I count myself fortunate to have had these opportunities, and I am grateful.

How can a human being detained for decades in prison survive in such a place without becoming a “monster”, as you have reflected in some of your writings? Can we say that Lucifer Rising saved you?

Prisons are unnatural places. They are ill-conceived responses to social problems like crime and mental illness — and in the US, anyone who breaks a law, mentally ill or not, is subject to incarceration in the prison system. In practice, imprisonment worsens these types of problems, generally speaking. Imprisonment warps the mind, not only of prisoners but also of the people who are paid to supervise them and keep them locked in.

Fairly early in my incarceration I became aware of the effects being in prison was having on me, and on others around me. By that time, I had already begun to slip into involvement in violent situations. When I saw what was happening I began to take steps to mitigate those negative effects. I resolved that I would never allow the prison environment to define me. Making a personal vow of non-violence that I have maintained to this day was one of those steps. By pouring myself into creative expression as an artist, along with promoting and maintaining healthy relationships with people on the outside, I have been able to gird myself against the insanity around me. It takes continuous effort and resolve, and a lot of vigilance, but it is possible to empower oneself to rise above the snares and pitfalls of prison life and maintain one’s personal integrity.

Yes, you could say that the Lucifer Rising soundtrack project saved me, in a way. It took years to complete the soundtrack compositions and recordings. During that time the project consumed me utterly. And it did so in a positive way. My concept for the Lucifer Rising themes was to musically describe the fallen angel’s desire to redeem himself, tracing his path through the dark passages he would pass through in his journey toward reconciliation and the light. The story, as I decided to interpret it, has certain resonances in my own life, so working on the project was cathartic.

Did you like Charles Manson’s music?

Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Charlie was a uniquely talented musician, but he had a tendency to be inconsistent in the way he approached musical performance. Much of this had to do with context. Some of his songs were a lot like songs for children, and were obviously meant to be sing-along songs for the people in his commune. Those songs would not have had much appeal to a general audience, and I have seen them used in sensationalist media to ridicule his musical ability. There were songs of Charlie’s that would not stand the tests of time, like much of the music that was made during the sixties, but many of his songs were entirely relevant for that period and some of them had real depth of meaning. The ones I liked best were those that he sang and played spontaneously, in a stream-of-consciousness style, like some rappers of today. As an improvisational player, I particularly enjoyed playing with him on songs he created in this mode. My accompaniment seemed to inspire him and helped to bring out the best qualities in his performances. This type of collaboration formed the basis of my relationship with him, such as it was. Unfortunately, no good recordings have survived.

You appear to have a deeply spiritual conception about purpose in relation to destiny. You have written that every person is born with some special ability or message they are meant to express in the world, a unique hand of cards to play in life. If you had not done “a bad thing” as your Professor Proponderus character said in the animated film you made, and been sent to prison, what do you think your life would have been like? Who would Bobby Beausoleil have become outside of jail? How would he have played his cards?

Taking my cue from the cards metaphor seems like the best place to begin a response to your questions ... The thing is, most human beings are not dealt only one hand of cards in life. Each time one makes a major decision in life, or has a significant accident, Destiny deals the individual a new hand of cards to play. It is impossible to say what my life might have been like had I not made the dire decisions that caused me to be sent to prison.

Some imaginative writers have postulated that each major decision creates a new timestream in a parallel universe. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, and it’s doubtful any of us ever will in our lifetimes, but let’s play along for the sake of giving due respect to what you are asking. Had I played my hand of cards differently in 1969 it’s conceivable that the Bobby Beausoleil of that alternate universe would have become a famous rock star, as I once hoped to be. Just as conceivable, the Bobby Beausoleil of another parallel universe might have wound up in some dark alley, dead of a drug overdose, something I have never had any aspirations to be.

We don’t get to choose beyond playing the cards we are dealt as well as we can in the hope that our decisions will take us to where we want to go. It is when we play our cards willy-nilly, without care, that we may instigate disasters in our lives and the lives of others. That said, I have done my best to play my cards well in the intervening years, and to overcome, to the extent that may be possible, the failings of my past. We shall see what the cards I play now will bring in the future.

Reading the transcript from your last parole hearing one can note that your artistic activity, and publishing communications with people outside of prison via the internet, has sometimes been used against you and your release. But you still do it. Do you do this out of a philosophical sense of duty, or because you feel safer in prison and don’t really want to be released? I mean, it seems like you’re shooting yourself in the foot ...My idea is that it’s only an excuse. It doesn’t matter what you do. For some people you will always be condemned because you have the Manson stigma on you.

Excuses are made by people who shirk the responsibilities they have agreed to accept, and who fail to have the courage to do the right thing and uphold those responsibilities. After long and very careful consideration, I resolved years ago that I would not restrict or limit my life in accordance with the excuses made by other people.

This is not an act of defiance by any means. I carefully follow the rules I am given to follow; none of my art or publishing actually violates any of them. And I assure you, I have no desire to wrap myself up in the dubious security of prison life. I want to get out of prison as much as any imprisoned person ever has. In the end, what it comes down to is that my spiritual obligation to fulfill my purpose in life trumps any of the rationalizations or excuses that may be used to justify keeping me in prison, and all the nonsense related to them.

A soul comes into the world for only a brief time and for the purpose, however slight it may be, to contribute to bringing sentience to the physical universe through expression of a God-given ability. This is called dharma, the purpose in life. Failing to uphold this responsibility is a breach of the sacred covenant a soul makes when coming into the world.

As an artist, it is my role to express creatively and to share the work I produce in such efforts with the world. Perhaps this will serve to uplift another soul, or to inspire someone to make their own dharmic contribution to the human mission. Or maybe it’s of no real value at all. In any case, I feel very strongly that I must remain true to my calling, and to fulfill my sacred obligation as a sentient soul, come what may.

In the years past I fought long and hard to restore myself to integrity. Too great an investment has been made to retreat from what I know I’m here to do, or to otherwise compromise my integrity out of fear of some arbitrary, politically motivated resistance. Clearly, nothing in the work I create is indicative of any violent tendencies. Excuses aside, this is what should be the focus in a parole consideration hearing. At some point I may be fortunate enough to have my case in front of arbiters who recognize that my creative efforts have been the instrument of my rehabilitation, restoring me to a responsible human being, and who will, in consideration of this, support my release from prison.

From your experience, what do you think of the use of social media and the internet?

My direct exposure to the internet has been limited by restrictive prison policies, but studying technological advancements is a hobby of mine. I won’t be left behind like Rip Van Winkle! As a multi-media artist, I am interested in how computers and computer devices like tablets and cell phones can be used to express creatively in new ways. There are artists out there who are doing amazing things with these new technologies!

The internet is a mixed bag, mostly because it is still like the wild west — a work in progress. For the everyday person to have rapid access to so much information is truly marvelous, extremely empowering, but this is only beneficial if the information is accurate. With every person able to have their very own pulpit there is way too much fake news and click-bait gossip poised to ensnare the unwary. I believe this will improve in time as the search engines incorporate better algorithms to snag and tag the suspicious content. On the other hand, there is the wonder of streaming media. I can’t wait to be able to catch up on come of the films and music I’ve been missing!

There is a lot about social media that doesn’t seem very sociable to me. The ability to communicate across vast distances in real time via texting and chatting on Facebook and other social media sites, with pictures and video, makes for an extremely valuable tool. That’s just it: a tool. There is no replacement for real sensory contact between human beings. We are hardwired for touch and direct eye contact. There are reasons why suicides are occurring more frequently in these times; it seems to me that too much reliance on social media platforms is part of the reason for this. It worries me that many young people will sit side-by-side and text to each other instead of looking at one another and talking. And too many people are cocooned in their personal bubbles, insulated from empathic connection to humanity, making derogatory, harsh, even hateful judgements of other people, often only because they are isolated and lonely and need to share their misery. Emojis are cute but they are a poor substitute for communicating real emotions. Humans are complex creatures. We can actually choose to be less anxious and depressed as a species by relying less on virtual socializing.

You took your freedom early, still a child, but soon you lost it. Unlike the stories of most prisoners, however, you affirm that your family situation was very positive when you were a child. Do you remember the happiest episode of your childhood, and the saddest one? Do you recall your childhood home and the scents of that time?

I remember my childhood home vividly, smells and all. Although I tended to be more adventurous than most of the kids I knew, my childhood was pretty average, growing up in a tract house nearly identical to all the other houses in the neighborhood. My happiest times were when I was sent off to stay with my grandmother during the summer, because the world seemed so much bigger in the Los Angeles area where she lived. My happiest memory there was finding an old guitar in my grandmother’s attic. Destiny dealt me a new hand of cards that day! The saddest day of my childhood was, at age 15, going with my family to my grandmother’s funeral. That was the day I left home for good, for some reasons that didn’t actually have anything to do with my grandmother’s death. I loved my family, but the family home was just too small.

Silvio Pellico, an Italian writer and patriot imprisoned for life in 1820, then given a commuted sentence and released after 10 years, stated that, without a doubt, free living is much better than living in prison, yet even in a miserable prison you can enjoy life. What do you think about this?

Prison is generally a pretty miserable place, that’s a fact. Spending my time in a puddle of self-pity has always been an option, just as it is for people on the outside. Choosing that option is what turns a miserable place into a hell. Many people in prison do just that. There is not only misery but a good deal of anger and rage in here as well. I mentioned earlier, I made the decision to not allow prison to define me. As a result, I have managed to do the extraordinary while in prison, and I have inspired some other prisoners to do similar things. While prison is a miserable place, being a miserable prisoner is not a must. Transcendence of misery is always possible no matter how hard it gets.

Your answer to a question no one has ever asked you ...

“Do you wear boxers or briefs under shorts?” No, I don’t.

Describe the room you live in and what your days are like at the prison where you live. What do you do for entertainment. How are you feeling?

My mind is much younger than my body, so naturally I have my share of aches and pains to deal with. To help preserve my health and activity I do hatha yoga on a semi-regular basis. I am also one of the two teachers for the yoga class here. A couple of times a week I play with other musicians here and once in a while we perform together in the prison house band. We have a music class once a week and I help with teaching guitar to students. Even though my spiritual orientation is grounded in the traditions of West Asia, I’m perfectly comfortable playing in the Gospel band in the prison chapel. Also once a week I take my guitar to the Hospice part of the prison hospital, and play music for men who are in the process of dying.

My cell is about the size of a typical bathroom in someone’s home. There’s a door in one end and a window in the other end that lets in daylight; there is a small sink, a toilet, and a large metal locker for storage. I use the top of the locker as my work surface. I’m using it now while typing these words. My bed is the size of a cot, a concrete block with a mat stuffed with jute fiber; of course, it serves also as a seat and a place where I set my art materials when working on a painting or drawing. My guitar shares the space, and I’ve got a small television and a radio. I would say that I live like a monk if my cell were not so cluttered with stuff for work, play, eating and sleeping. I manage to figure out ways to make the space work for me fairly well under the circumstances.

I currently have a job five days a week in the prison library. It takes up a bit too much of my time and sometimes conflicts with things I’m trying to do. But then, most people who have jobs have similar problems.

Much of my time has been going into writing and editing. A couple of books are in the works, one of which is scheduled for publication in 2019. This leaves me little time for reading, though I manage to find some time to read, mostly books on spiritual philosophy, mythology, media technology. But when it comes to words it’s the writing that gets most of the juice. I love good films and some television dramas, if they are done well. I will watch the TV for two or three hours in the evening if there is something on worth my attention. Some of my writing time naturally goes to communicating with family and friends, creative collaborators, and, when I can fit it in, some of the fans of my work as well.

My long-awaited double vinyl LP, Voodoo Shivaya, a concept album I worked on for seven years, recently debuted. The response has been gratifying, quite favorable so far, even though the music does not fit in any of the established categories or genres. So I’m feeling pretty happy that I’ve been able to share this music with the world.

Do you have a suggestion you can give us?

Try to avoid killing anyone, if you can. It is very very difficult to come back from something like that. And if you find yourself faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, don’t be too shy to ask for help. The best place to look for help is deep within yourself where you will surely find great resources of strength and courage you may not yet be aware of. And remember, there is always at least one way to play your cards that will allow you to prevail over and ultimately transcend any challenge.

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Bio

Bobby Beausoleil was born on November 6, 1947, to a large working-class family living in Santa Barbara, California, and christened Robert Kenneth Beausoleil. His prodigious creative output over his lifetime has been largely overshadowed by his having been an associate of Charles Manson in the late 1960s. He was apparently involved in a drug transaction with members of the now long defunct Straight Satans motorcycle club, who were also associates of Manson, leading to his being sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Gary Hinman, who was also associated with Manson and his communal family. Young Bobby was a good-looking boy with a pronounced musical talent but his curiosity and rebelliousness got him into minor scrapes with the law. At the age of 14 he was sent to a camp for wayward boys for truancy and repeatedly running away from home. A few months after his release from the boys camp he again left home, at age 15, for the final time. He drifted down to the Los Angeles area where he played guitar in rock bands and became immersed in the early development of the counterculture movement. Beausoleil was interested in film at an early age, and has worked in film and related media in various capacities both on the acting side and behind the scenes production. His first film appearance was in the art film classic Mondo Hollywood, in which he appeared briefly, at age 16, in a scene depicting him as Cupid shooting an arrow from his bow. He made acting appearances in several films after that and has also composed musical scores for film and produced some short films of his own during his imprisonment. In late 1965, following a brief stint playing rhythm guitar in a rock band called The Grass Roots (subsequently to become known as Love) with singer and songwriter Arthur Lee and guitarist Johnny Echols, Beausoleil moved to San Francisco. In a short time, he found his way to a then quiet artist community in a district known as the Haight-Ashbury, where the band The Grateful Dead lived communally in a large house, and began forming his own psychedelic band. The music made by this band is documented on an album, "The Orkustra: Experiments in Electric Orchestra from the San Francisco Psychedelic Underground", which includes soundtracks made for underground experimental films. While living in San Francisco, during the time he was performing with The Orkustra, Beausoleil met and became creatively involved with underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In 1967, Anger was working on a new film project entitled Lucifer Rising, a "love vision" based on Anger's interpretation of the fallen angel mythology. The filmmaker asked Beausoleil to star in the film, who agreed on the condition that he would compose and record the film' s soundtrack. He put together a new band specifically for this project and named it The Magick Powerhouse of Oz. The collaboration fell apart in the fall of that year, but Anger would later use the film he had shot of Beausoleil in his film Invocation of My Demon Brother, which incorporates an electronic music composition by Mick Jagger as its soundtrack. Of minor note, Beausoleil portrayed the leader of an outlaw band of Indians in the 1968 production of The Ramrodder, a soft-porn cowboys and Indians' farce. In the mid-1970s Kenneth Anger, while living in England, resurrected the Lucifer Rising film project, with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page designated to create the soundtrack for the film. However, Anger was dissatisfied with Page's performance. He then turned to Bobby Beausoleil and made arrangements with him to produce the film's soundtrack from prison. The Freedom Orchestra, Beausoleil's prison band, supported him in creating the recordings of the score and the master of the soundtrack was delivered to Anger in 1979. The film debuted in New York in 1980. The recordings made by Beausoleil for the Lucifer Rising film project, including the 1967 version, are fully documented in "The Lucifer Rising Suite", a boxed anthology album released in 2013. The soundtrack is widely considered to be influential, and portions of the soundtrack have been used in other films, including Gaspar Noe's erotic film Love, as well as two films by Chris Mourkarbel, Me @The Zoo and Gaga: Five Foot Two. After completing the film soundtrack Beausoleil continued his studies in film production, videography, sound design, and creating various types of media for film, including 3D animation. He has released eight albums, seven of them recorded while he has been in prison, the most recent being the 2-disk concept album Voodoo Shivaya, recorded between 2008 and 2015. He has also created a significant body of visual art, paintings and drawings. Beausoleil married in 1982, and his wife Barbara was instrumental in keeping him connected with the world at large until she died from a sudden illness in 2012. The website she established on her husband's behalf is now maintained and kept up to date by close friends and family. Nearly all of Beausoleil's creative works can be streamed and viewed at www.bobbybeausoleil.com. Beausoleil remains behind bars but may one day be granted parole, as he did not play a role in the horrific murders committed by Charles Watson and other members of Manson's family that occurred subsequent to his imprisonment for the Hinman murder. His behavior while incarcerated is said to be exemplary. 

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Interview with Bardo Methodology (Part One) en Espanol

Niklas Göransson

Músico, escritor y artista visual; Bobby BeauSoleil está sirviendo una sentencia a cadena perpetua. Su historia - sobre ser condenado a morir, de cultivar espiritualidad en alrededores de pesadilla, y de ser uno con lo arcano para sobrevivir al infierno.

Bobby Beausoleil reside en el sistema penitenciario de California. Habiendo sido inicialmente puesto en la línea para la pena de muerte, ahora está sentenciado a pasar el resto de su vida en la prisión por un homicidio conectado a la supuesta Familia Manson. Este caso está bien documentado en otros lugares, así que no gastaremos tiempo en él. Tengo el placer presentarles a un artista en cada sentido concebible de la palabra, un artista que no debería ser definido por malas elecciones hace 50 años.

- Era un desastre cuando me trajeron a San Quentin Death Row. Mantener la sanidad ya era una causa perdida hasta ese punto; dos juicios, un año en la Prisión del Condado de Los Angeles, y la exposición a toda la histeria y locura alrededor de Charles Manson me hizo pasar por malos ratos. Lo peor de todo era la carga del crimen que había cometido.

En Abril de 1970, Bobby BeauSoleil fue encontrado culpable de asesinato premeditado y sentenciado a morir. Dos años más tarde, la Corte Suprema de California consideró la pena de muerte inconstitucional, lo que siguió fue que su sentencia se convirtiera en un encarcelamiento de por vida.

- La vergüenza de haber matado a un hombre decente por razones que no pueden ser justificadas como honorables fue una gran carga sobre mis hombros. Me deshonré a mí mismo, a mi familia y a muchas otras personas a las que quería - y hasta ese punto no había hecho las paces con las consecuencias personales por lo que había hecho. El problema con la vergüenza es que es tan debilitante, nada puede suceder en ese estado; deslumbra a la mente, lo que hace el pensamiento auto-accionado casi imposible.

Como si no fuese suficiente, este tipo de estasis mental es en gran parte reforzado por el ambiente penitenciario.

- Lo que finalmente me salvó fue la epifanía de que el encarcelamiento es un estado mental. Las prisiones, por su propio diseño, están diseñadas para reducir a los presos a puta impotencia, está diseñado para mantenerlos atados no sólo física sino mental y emocionalmente también. Sólo al conectarse al centro espiritual propio puede hacerse posible cualquier tipo de liberación.

¿Cómo te puedes disculpar a ti mismo por algo como esto, si es que es posible?

- Con algo de alimento la mente eventualmente pierde su agarre sobre la vergüenza. Esto revela a la culpa, claro, lo que sólo es una mejora marginal pero al menos permite algo de espacio al comenzar el proceso de hacer cuentas con uno mismo.

Estando en la posición en la que Bobby estaba en ese entonces - un hombre joven bien parecido, un músico dotado con la vida por delante pero encarcelado por algo que suena como un medio bastante desagradable; pienso que debe haber requerido una fuerza mental inmensa no sólo haber mantenido la calma sino también haber sacado algo positivo de la situación.

- He aplicado este principio muchas veces a lo largo de mi vida.

- Hace mucho tiempo decidí que la prisión y la etiqueta de criminal no me definirían. No me permitiré identificarme internamente con alguien que está encarcelado. Soy la expresión de la liberación, sin importar de las circunstancias externas. La fuerza de voluntad sólo es una herramienta útil para mantener el propósito.

En ese punto, la fuerza de voluntad y la determinación se hicieron sus aliados en disolver un hábito que no le servía.

- I have applied this principle many times throughout my life. Long ago, I decided that prison and the criminal label that comes attached to it would not define me. I will not allow myself to internally identify as one who is imprisoned. I am the expression of freedom itself, regardless of external circumstance. Willpower comes into play only as a helpful tool for maintaining resolve.

Bobby es, entendiblemente, bastante precavido con las entrevistas, tras una bastante desastrosa cuando el escritor Americano llamado Truman Capote lo visitó en San Quentin. Un autor bien conocido, dramaturgo y actor que alcanzó su punto álgido en los cincuentas y sesentas, el trabajo de Capote ha engendrado más de 20 películas y dramas de televisión. Murió en 1984, a sus 59 años de edad.

- Cuando leí recientemente en una biografía que Capote rutinariamente explotaba sus temas, no me fue nada sorprendente. En ese entonces, acepté reunirme con él a fines de 1972 a comienzos del '73, era completamente ignorante de su metodología periodística y no había leído nada de lo que había escrito. Mi decisión de hablar con él fue muy tonta, predeciblemente porque tomé esa decisión por aferrarme a la esperanza de que un escritor tan famoso podría traer algo de atención a mi causa.

Como Bobby aprendió, la desesperación suele resultar en decisiones pobres.

- Tomé muchas malas decisiones durante ese periodo de mi vida. Supuestamente, Capote no tomó notas - asegurando que tenía una memoria infalible pese al alcoholismo que ha sido notado como un aspecto muy prominente de su historia. Es poco sorprendente que la versión de nuestra conversación que publicó en su libro de 1980 Music For Chamaleons tiene una muy precaria similitud a la entrevista original.

Hay un comentario notable en el artículo el cual creo que Bobby ha verificado como auténtico, pero no el contexto en que fue usado: "Todo en la vida es bueno. Todo fluye. Todo es bueno. Todo es música."

- La frase que has citado se acerca bastante a uno de los comentarios que le hice, aunque es parafraseado. Lo que había sido un intento de describir mi filosofía espiritual fue estructurado en la entrevista ficcionalizada de Capote en el contexto de una vaga racionalización de asesinato. Metí la pata bastante estúpidamente. En ese entonces, no sabía de su inclinación fetichista porque sus lectores lo percibieran en la compañía de jóvenes asesinos hombres. La historia está escrita por los necios, y es nuestra culpa por ser tan crédulos. Truman Capote fue uno de esos escritores que ayudó a hacer las noticias falsas el nuevo "normal". Ya hemos hablado suficiente de él.

Bobby explica que frases como "La vida sólo fluye; todo es bueno" funcionan sólo si son atribuidas a el "eterno testigo como la existencia misma".

- Desde la perspectiva de un alma individual pasando a través de la condición humana, una frase así parece la que sólo una persona insana diría. Claro, hay muchas cosas que experimentamos como malas; el dolor, miedo, violencia, guerra, enfermedad, muerte. Todos podemos coincidir en que la victimización está mal - no discutiré eso, hablando desde la humanidad que todos tenemos en común.

Sólo a través de la identificación con lo eterno se hace posible entender, él declara, que las cosas que experimentamos como negativas o malignas mientras moramos en condiciones terráqueas y mundanas son pasajeras y transitorias, y por lo tanto irreales.

- De ninguna forma son una mancha en la bondad innata de la existencia de uno como lo divino. Desde este punto de vista, se hace posible encontrar paz incluso en medio de la increíble turbulencia. Así es como sobreviví al infierno.

En la misma nota, se le volvió a negar la libertad condicional a Bobby una vez más en Octubre 14, 2016.

- He estado en consideración de libertad condicional unas 40 ocasiones en los últimos 47 años. De hecho, tantas veces que tanto yo como ellos hemos perdido la cuenta. Una rápida inspección a las estadísticas de encarcelación de Estados Unidos revelará la locura que existe en la actualidad en el sistema de justicia criminal.

Él dice que esto tiene poco que ver con el supuesto propósito de preservar la seguridad pública, y que es regido por fuerzas económicas-socio-políticas.

- Claro, mi afiliación de una sola ocasión con personas poco confiables contribuye un par de arrugas adicionales que desde la perspectiva de alguien solicitando libertad condicional hace mi caso más complicado. Consecuentemente, los factores como el buen comportamiento, los logros vocacionales, el apoyo comunitario y demás evidencias de rehabilitación tienen poca influencia en el resultado de esto.

Durante la audiencia más reciente de Bobby el año pasado, la junta de libertad condicional estimó el tiempo de su crimen como 15 años.

- Esto sugeriría que están algo tarde para concederme libertad condicional, teniendo en cuenta que he servido más de 32 años adicionales a su estimado. En todo caso, el simple hecho de que haya un estimado quizás sea un indicativo de que mis esperanzas hayan mejorado. Veremos qué nos trae la próxima audiencia.

Pasar por este ciclo sin fin de apelaciones y negaciones debe ser una nefasta montaña rusa emocional.

- ¡El karma es una perra! El hechizo que tejí para mí mismo cuando me puse en esta situación se ha enredado tanto con los eventos subsecuentes que aún me falta idear uno capaz de desenredarme y desatarme. Mientras tanto, hago lo que debo para mantener mi espíritu en un buen lugar.

Bobby dice que la auto-compasión es un mal compañero y una inútil pérdida de tiempo - sólo él es responsable por estar en este predicamento.

- Aprender a hacerte responsable por las consecuencias, en adición de todas las valiosas lecciones que he recibido en el camino, bien pueden haber hecho valer la pena todos los sacrificios que compré con las decisiones que tomé hace tiempo. Siempre estará el Gran Trabajo, y esto junto a algunas profundas relaciones con amigos y familiares que me han sostenido a través de los tiempos difíciles.

Bobby ha estado en prisión más tiempo de lo que yo he estado vivo. A mi edad, ya había estado encerrado por casi la mitad de su vida. Por lo tanto, sospecho que el tiempo es un concepto con el que tenemos una relación diferente.

- Las nociones sobre el tiempo y la experiencia del tiempo son un campo de juego sin fin en el universo en que te encuentres. Como músico, he estado jugando con el tiempo en varias formas durante casi toda mi vida, y sin duda muchas vidas pasadas.

Él explica que la música es, entre otras cosas, el estudio de cómo el tiempo puede ser separado en ritmos - y cómo la experiencia subjetiva del tiempo se sesga psicológicamente.

- El tiempo se envuelve a sí mismo en una manera circular a través de los Yugas como el río proverbial de Buda y se extiende de una manera Einsteiniana dependiendo del ritmo de la velocidad en el espacio relativo. La ilusión del tiempo parece progresar linealmente para todos los que visitan esta realidad física, cuando en verdad todo es un momento eterno singular.

Como si todo esto no fuese suficiente que asimilar, la invención de las prisiones nos ha dado el diabólico concepto de "hacer" tiempo.

- Esa es jerga de convicto viejo para referirse al tiempo que se usa como castigo para un crimen. Encuentro que esta noción es el peor tipo de auto-abuso que una sociedad puede infligir sobre sí misma. Claro, yo experimento el tiempo igual que la mayoría de personas en el mundo. Parece gatear cuando lo observo, y se escabulle tan rápido cuando le doy la espalda. Y la gente que amo ha dejado el mundo tan rápido.

Bobby dice que puede haber una gran incomodidad experimentada en el paso subjetivo del tiempo, pero ninguna peor que el dolor de la deprivación de conexiones sociales normales y oportunidad creativa.

- Si mi vida ejemplifica una sola cosa, es que he aplastado la noción de hacer tiempo - o de que me hagan tiempo. No he aceptado la extraña idea de que mi tiempo de vida debería ser tratada como una sentencia. Así es como he logrado escapar las aparentes limitaciones de mi confinamiento físico y hacer oportunidades y conexiones que la mayoría de personas que conozco en prisión son incapaces de encontrar. Algunos se han beneficiado de mi ejemplo, y espero que otros encuentren en él alguna inspiración para buscar un camino más brillante, tanto dentro como fuera de prisión. Ese puede ser mi verdadero legado.

Teniendo en mente tu percepción única, ¿qué opinas de la pena capital?

- Habiendo estado en el Corredor de la Muerte, y personalmente llevado a contención con la caprichosa y mal concebida manera en que la pena de muerte ha sido administrada en mi país, naturalmente he desarrollado opiniones críticas y puntiagudas sobre el tema. Tras una larga historia de tomar las vidas de la gente en las formas más horribles imaginables, Europa finalmente reaccionó y renunció a las ejecuciones judiciales - y por extensión, renunció a la única insidiosa neurosis que endilga sobre sus practicantes. La sabiduría demostrada por esta decisión muestra la madurez de las naciones de Europa.

La pena capital actualmente es empleada por 31 de los 50 estados de Estados Unidos, al igual que por su gobierno federal y los militares. Hay aproximadamente 2900 individuos encarcelados con sentencias de muerte pendientes.

- Esta nación ha fallado en llegar a un consenso en la práctica de emplear asesinato sancionado por el estado como retribución por crímenes espentosos. Esto habla a un malestar general tan penetrante en el sistema de justicia criminal Estadunidense, una ingenuidad proviniendo de persistentemente formular las preguntas equivocadas e inevitablemente llegar a conclusiones incorrectas.

Él dice que todos podemos coincidir en que ciertos casos de crimen violento son tan abominables que parecen merecer los castigos más severos.

- Pero preguntar si un asesino "merece" morir por un crimen particularmente horrible no es el punto. Una sociedad que condena el acto ilegal del homicidio mientras que hipócritamente participa en asesinatos ceremoniales vengativos como una institución social efectivamente se condena a un dilema moral que no puede ser reconciliado.

Los torrentes ideológicos contradictorios como este nunca coexistirán en la mente pacíficamente; no pueden ser saldados.

- En una escala nacional, una postura moral tan bifurcada interrumpe la integridad de la fábrica social con un cisma que produce una especie de psicosis colectiva - tan perniciosa en este contexto que en ocasiones puede instigar un frenesí de actitudes violentas dirigidas a un enemigo arbitraria y vagamente definido.

Bobby añade que una cultura arraigada en abrazar este acertijo retorcido nunca podrá estar en paz consigo misma.

- El asesinato es asesinato, y las desapasionadas matanzas rituales hechas en el nombre de la justicia son probablemente los de la peor clase. Este dilema ético y moral desafía una resolución pacífica; la justificación no se sostendrá sin importar la racionalidad que se aplique a esta.

Para ilustrar su punto, él pide que consideremos el proceso, con una duración usual en décadas, de llevar a una persona condenada al punto de la ejecución en Estados Unidos. Primero, está el largo y costoso proceso de las apelaciones.

- Esto usualmente toma un número de años, a veces décadas, antes de que el condenado sea finalmente despachado - probablemente después de numerosos aplazamientos y reprogramaciones emocionalmente traumáticas. Una vez todo es dicho y hecho, es enteramente posible que el individuo que está siendo castigado con la muerte ya no cuente con la posesión de la misma personalidad que quien perpetró el crimen en espera de expiación.

La constitución de Estados Unidos proscribe el "castigo cruel e inusual", pero no la pena de muerte en sí.

- La decisión de emplear la pena capital o no fue se dejó a la merced de cada estado, y los que optaron por ella deben seleccionar un método de ejecución de acuerdo a los mandatos constitucionales. Están fuera de cuestión los instrumentos de muerte medievales diabólicamente concebidos y los espectáculos tan populares de los siglos pasados.

Los estados que emplean la pena de muerte diversamente eligen entre el ahorcamiento, pelotón de fusilamiento, la silla eléctrica, gas venenoso en una cámara sellada y, recientemente, químicos inyectados vía intravenosa mientras el condenado está atado en la posición de crucifixión.

- Todos estos métodos abundan en angustia inesperada y percances que han alzado el espectro del castigo cruel e inusual. Consecuentemente, la pena capital en Estados Unidos históricamente ha estado acompañada por un flujo constante de litigio en las cortes.

¿A qué método estabas programado?

- Cámara de gas. Cuando llegué al Corredor de la Muerte en 1970, la prensa le estaba dando bastante atención al debate de la pena capital. Recuerdo leer un artículo describiendo el proceso en gran detalle. Originalmente considerado como una forma más "humana" de matar a una persona, resultó ser que la muerte por inhalar gas de cianuro no implicaba ser dormido pacíficamente como el público general había sido llevado a creer.

El condenado es atado a una silla metálica atornillada al piso, luego la cámara es sellada. Un artefacto mecánico suelta una capsula de cianuro en un recipiente con ácido clorhídrico bajo el asiento de la silla.

- Cuando la cápsula de gelatina se disuelve, el gas de cianuro se alza y envuelve a la víctima, quien eventualmente deberá respirar y llevar la nube de veneno a sus pulmones. El problema con este sistema deriva de que el cianuro desgarra los tejidos suaves a medida que entra, básicamente derrite la carne mientras es químicamente incinerada y las células explotan. De acuerdo a testigos de ejecución aterrados, el condenado muere en agonía incluso cuando es voluntariamente sedado antes de ser llevado a la cámara de gas.

No puedo imaginar cómo debió ser leer algo como eso mientras esperas ser victimizado por el mismo proceso.

- Me visualizaba siendo puesto a través del proceso en tanto detalle como pude, lo hice una y otra vez - visualizar mi ejecución tan vívidamente como era posible - a lo largo de un par de meses, hasta que estuve seguro que mi miedo de morir de esta forma no tendría ningún poder sobre mí.

Bobby especula que quizás estas meditaciones le ayudaron a llegar a una especie de obligación kármica, pues lo empoderaron a ir más allá de sus miedos.

- Podía superar las ideas de morir una muerte innoble en una cámara de gas. En todo caso, las damas del destino intervinieron y me permitieron la oportunidad de encontrar un camino en medio de la oscuridad y de hacer lo que debo hacer en este mundo.

Hablando de lo cual, el nuevo álbum de Bobby "Voodoo Shivaya" está por ser lanzado por The Ajna Offensive antes de que 2017 acabe. Debo admitir que encuentro el título algo confuso.

- El "voodoo" en el título no está intencionado como una referencia al Vudu, la religión chamánica de África, ni su variante politeísta practicada en lugares como Haití y New Orleans - aunque hay una leve referencia bien intencionada a esta última. La yuxtaposición en el título es una referencia oblicua a cómo mi orientación espiritual y progreso se han desarrollado y evolucionado a lo largo de mi vida.

En el tema de lo esotérico, recuerdo leer sobre que Bobby estudió la doctrina de Thelema en la colección privada del director de cine Kenneth Anger mientras vivía en un apartamento adyacente en la mansión llamada Russian Embassy. La Corriente 93 parece haber dejado una impresión en ese entonces, teniendo en mente el nombre de su primera banda, The Magick Powerhouse Of Oz.

- ¡Ah, Thelema! Muchos asumen que los escritos de Aleister Crowley que capturaron mi interés durante el breve periodo de tiempo en que tuve acceso a la ecléctica librería de Kenneth Anger. Aunque me intrigaba la influencia de Crowley sobre las sensibilidades artísticas de Anger, generalmente encontré que sus escritos eran muy densos y complejos para mi cerebro de 19 años. Estaba más interesado en los libros con dibujos.

Muchos de estos trabajos fuero ilustrados con dibujos que datan principalmente de fines del siglo 19 y comienzos del siglo 20, conocidos como la era dorada de la ilustración.

- ¡Me encantaba el arte! El arte orientada hacia la mitología y el misticismo siempre han sido poderosas influencias en mi vida. Años después, cuando estaba listo, exploré algo del trabajo de Crowley. No llegaría hasta el punto de decir que hice un estudio de ello pero fui cautivado por muchos pensamientos e ideas.

A través de esta búsqueda casual se hizo claro para Bobby cómo Crowley había tomado muchas nociones filosóficas de varias culturas alrededor del mundo y a lo largo de la historia antigua; Egipto, Grecia, Roma, El Valle del Indo, las Tierras Santas y Europa del norte.

- Luego las mezcló con ocultismo de Europa más reciente y algunas de sus ideas propias para desarrollar una filosofía mística atractiva para el intelecto de occidente. Una vez entendí que muchas de las ideas de Crowley eran derivativas, mi inclinación fue buscar por encima de su hombro directo hacia las fuentes para poder encontrar un camino espiritual más acorde conmigo.

La autenticidad, él dice, es de la máxima importancia.

- Por ejemplo - los sutras en el Tantra que involucran la sexualidad como un método de despertar espiritualidad tienen más resonancia conmigo que el concepto de sex magick de Growley. Todos deben encontrar el camino que es correcto para ellos.

¿La magick alguna vez funcionó para ti?

- ¡Una pregunta muy interesante! Y una que encuentro algo humorosa, porque es una pregunta imposible de responder con el más mínimo ápice de certeza de honestidad. Ningún practicante de las artes arcanas puede dar por hecho si el logro de un resultado deseado fue producido por una invocación exitosa, o si el resultado habría ocurrido de todos modos como proceso de manifestación natural que casualmente sucedió en sincronía. Desafío a cualquiera a distinguir la diferencia con la certeza.

En el mejor de los casos, es cuestión de interpretación del misterio que acata tras el evento. Por lo tanto, parecería para Bobby que la respuesta es auto-evidente.

- Las puertas de la oportunidad que se han abierto para mí, hasta donde he podido determinar, no fueron detectadas por ningún otro prisionero en la historia. Al menos no en la misma forma que a mí - insisto, hasta donde he podido determinar. Esto claramente es testamento al poder de la intención y la voluntad determinada, aspectos inseparables de las artes mágicos.

Pero, Bobby agrega con ironía, también se podría atribuir a la buena suerte. Dicho eso, él no es alguien que se incline a la superstición.

- Hace unos años acepté el consejo de los sabios que enseñan que el uso de los astabala-siddhis, los poderes ocultos, deberían ser evitados por alguien que aspira a la verdad mayor. Esto no se debe a que haya algo mal con ellos o que sean inherentemente malévolos en sus artes - simplemente que invariablemente promueven los intereses terrenales de su practicante, y por lo tanto se convierten en una distracción de la realización del ser superlativo de uno mismo.

La estructura referencial personal de Bobby es el resultado de un "voodoo", o una amalgama de influencias espirituales y culturales.

- Un camino que ha serpenteado por aquí y por allá como he explorado en los rincones y grietas de mi alma. Hay guiños a esto a lo largo de "Voodoo Shivaya", una íntima referencia a algo increíblemente profundo.

Las religiones basadas en la tierra, la brujería, el chamanismo y la magia, al igual que las enseñanzas del nazareno, de Buda, los rishi, y muchos santos que trascendieron las religiones que representaban - todos ellos han alimentado a Bobby de alguna manera.

- He bebido de muchas fuentes y torrentes para encontrar las aguas más dulces, y aquí bebo profundamente. Las artes mágicas no son un atajo. De hecho, pueden ser un callejón sin salida, incluso una caída fatal. Sólo pueden ser de asistencia si la meta auténtica ha sido propiamente entendida. ¿Acaso imaginamos que los alquimistas con sus sombreros puntiagudos en verdad intentaban transformar el plomo en oro - un metal pesado en otro - o esta noción se originó como una metáfora del orden mayor de refinamiento en el consciente humano?

Bobby declara que la mágica verdadera es el arte de transformar la oscuridad en luz dentro de uno mismo.

- Desde la verdad menor hasta la Verdad mayor. Es el arte de alinear la voluntad propia en sincronía con lo divino. En una manera sutil, mi próximo álbum habla sobre esto, mi viaje personal hacia una identidad espiritual auténtica. En ese sentido, podría decirse que continúa lo que mi álbum "Lucifer Rising" comenzó.

[bbreferencearchive]

My Adventures in the Bardo

Over recent months I have been participating in interviews with Niklas Göransson for Bardo Methodology, a printed magazine published on a, um, somewhat improvisational timetable in Sweden. If you are at all interested in knowing what makes me tick at the deepest levels of my being, particularly in relation to what inspires me in my creative work, this series of interviews may be of interest to you.

Bardo Methodology is an English-language magazine featuring interviews with artists, musicians, philosophers, mystics, scholars, scientific researchers, and weirdos like me who are given to mixing disciplines. The magazine explores a broad range of unusual topics, with emphasis on the strange and esoteric. It is aimed at seekers of a deepening understanding of reality, and examines techniques that may be an aid to them in their search. The visual design of the magazine is facilitated by artist Timo Ketola, and leans to the shadow side of the visual art spectrum.

A somewhat abridged version of my first interview with Niklas as can be read below. The full version is published in Bardo Methodology #2, and the second interview in the series will appear in issue #3. The physical magazine is distributed in North America by The Ajna Offensive: https://www.theajnaoffensive.com. Elsewhere the magazine can be ordered from BardoMethodology.com, where you can also read highlights of past articles and see images of some fascinating art.

-Bobby (yes it's really me) BeauSoleil

Bardo Methodology Interview (Part One)

Niklas Göransson

Musician, writer and visual artist; Bobby BeauSoleil is also serving a life sentence in prison. His tale is one of being condemned to die, of cultivating spirituality in nightmarish surroundings, and drawing upon the arcane to survive hell.

This is an excerpt from the full article -  which is twice as long, significantly more in-depth, and featured in Bardo Methodology #2.

Bobby BeauSoleil presently resides within the California penitentiary system. Having initially been handed the death penalty, he's currently sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for a homicide connected to the so-called Manson Family. This case is heavily documented elsewhere, so we shall waste no time on it. I have the pleasure of introducing to you an artist in every conceivable sense of the word, one who should not be defined by poor choices made fifty years ago.

- I was a mess when they brought me to the San Quentin Death Row. Maintaining sanity was already a lost cause by that point; two trials, a year in the Los Angeles County Jail, and exposure to all the hysteria and madness around Charlie Manson had put me through the wringer. Worst of all was the burden of the crime I had committed.

In April 1970, Bobby BeauSoleil was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to die. Two years later, the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty statute unconstitutional, following which his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

- The shame of having killed a decent man for reasons which cannot be justified as honourable weighed heavily on me. I had dishonoured myself, my family and many other people I cared about - and at that point I hadn't even begun to come to terms with the personal consequences for what I'd done. The problem with shame is that it's so debilitating, nothing much happens in that state; it mesmerises the mind, rendering self-actuated thought nearly impossible.

To make matters worse, this sort of mental stasis is for the most part reinforced by the prison environment.

- What ultimately saved me was the epiphany that imprisonment is a state of mind. Prisons by their very design serve to reduce the incarcerated to powerlessness, to hold them in place not only physically but mentally and emotionally as well. Only by connecting to one's spiritual centre does any kind of liberation become possible.

How does one forgive oneself for something like this then, can it be done?

- Given a little nourishment, the mind will eventually loosen its grip on shame. This reveals the guilt, of course, which is only a marginal improvement but at least allows a bit of wiggle-room in beginning the process of accounting for oneself.

Being in the position Bobby was at the time - a handsome young man, a gifted musician with his whole life ahead of him but incarcerated in what by all accounts sounds like a fairly unsavoury milieu; I'm thinking it must have required immense mental strength to not only keep it together but also make something positive out of the situation.

- Willpower is overrated. I tried for years to give up cigarettes using willpower alone - multiple times, and it didn't work. What I've discovered is that breaking old habits or achieving personal goals has more to do with self-identification than determination, at least in my case. Once I realised how being subordinate to an external substance is not who I am, that was it; nicotine no longer had a hold on me.

At that point, willpower and determination became allies in dissolving a habit no longer serving him.

- I have applied this principle many times throughout my life. Long ago, I decided that prison and the criminal label that comes attached to it would not define me. I will not allow myself to internally identify as one who is imprisoned. I am the expression of freedom itself, regardless of external circumstance. Willpower comes into play only as a helpful tool for maintaining resolve.

Bobby is quite understandably a bit wary of interviews, following a disastrous one in the seventies when an American writer called Truman Capote visited him in San Quentin. A well-known author, playwright and actor who had his peak in the fifties and sixties, Capote's work has spawned more than twenty films and television dramas. He died in 1984, at fifty-nine years of age.

- When I recently read in a biography that Capote had routinely exploited his subjects, it came as no surprise to me. At the time I agreed to meet with him, in late 1972 or early '73, I was completely ignorant of his approach to journalism and hadn't read anything he'd written. My decision to speak with him was foolish, predictably so because I made it while clinging to the hope that such a famous writer might bring some advocacy to my cause.

As Bobby himself learned, desperate needs often result in poor decisions.

- I made a bunch of bad choices during that period of my life. Reportedly, Capote did not take notes - claiming to have an infallible memory despite the alcoholism that's been noted as a prominent feature of his story. Little wonder how the version of our conversation he published in his 1980 Music for Chameleons book bears only marginal resemblance to the original interview.

There is a notable comment in the article which I believe Bobby has verified as authentic, although not quite in the context it was used: 'Everything in life is good. It all flows. It's all good. It's all music.'

- The statement you've quoted comes fairly close to one of the remarks I made to him, though paraphrased. What had been an attempt at describing my fledgling spiritual philosophy was in Capote's fictionalised interview piece framed in the context of a vague rationalisation for murder. I rather stupidly walked into that one. At the time, I was unaware of his fetishist penchant for having his readers perceive him in the company of young male killers. History is written by fools, and it's our own fault for being so gullible. Truman Capote was one of those writers who helped make fake news the new normal. Enough said about him.

Bobby explains that statements such as 'Life just flows; it's all good.' work only if attributed to the 'eternal witness as existence itself'.

- From the perspective of an individual soul undergoing the human condition, such a statement seems like one only an insane person would make. Of course, there are many things we experience as bad; pain, fear, violence, war, disease, death. We can all agree that victimisation is evil - no argument from me there, speaking from the humanity we all hold in common.

Only through identification with the eternal does it become possible to understand, he decrees, that things we experience as negative or evil while we dwell in worldly conditions are fleeting and transitory, and therefore unreal.

- They are in no way a stain on the innate goodness of one's existence as the divine. From this standpoint, it becomes possible to find peace even in the midst of incredible turmoil. This is how I survived hell.

On that note, Bobby's parole was denied once again on October 14, 2016.

- I've been before the parole authorities for consideration on roughly twenty occasions in the past forty-seven years. Actually, so many times that me and the parole board both have lost accurate count. A quick glance at U.S. incarceration statistics will reveal the insanity of the currently existing criminal justice system.

He says this has little to do with its stated purpose of preserving public safety, and is driven by socio-political-economic forces.

- Of course, my one-time affiliation with some disreputable persons contributes additional wrinkles which from the standpoint of someone on the parole board or holding political office makes my case more complicated. Consequently, factors such as good behaviour, vocational accomplishments, community support and other evidence of rehabilitation have had little bearing on outcomes up to this point.

During Bobby's most recent hearing last year, the parole board assessed the time for his crime to fifteen years.

- This would suggest I'm well overdue for parole given that I've served thirty-two years beyond this assessment. In any case, the mere fact that one has finally been made is perhaps indicative of my outlooks for parole having improved. We'll see what the next hearing brings.

Going through this endless cycle of appeals and denials must be a ghastly emotional roller-coaster?

- Karma is a bitch! The spell I wove for myself when I so thoughtlessly put myself in this situation has become so tangled up with subsequent events that I have as yet contrived the one capable of unravelling and unbinding me. For the meantime, I do what I must to keep my spirit in a good place.

Bobby says that self-pity is a poor companion and a pointless waste of time - he alone is responsible for landing himself in this predicament.

- Learning how to take ownership for consequences, in addition to all the other valuable lessons I've received along the way, may well have been worth the sacrifices I purchased when those fateful choices were made so long ago. There's always the Great Work, and this along with some deep and abiding relationships with friends and family have sustained me through the hard times.

Bobby has been in prison longer than I've been alive. At my age, he'd already been locked up almost half his life. As such, time is a concept I suspect we have a profoundly different relationship to.

- Notions about time and the experience of time are an endless playground wherever in the universe one finds oneself. As a musician, I've been playing with and cutting up time in various ways nearly all my life, and no doubt many previous lifetimes.

He explains that music is, among other things, the study of how time can be broken into beats - and how the subjective experience of time warps psychologically.

- Time wraps upon itself in a circular manner through all the Yugas like the Buddha's proverbial river and stretches in Einsteinian fashion depending on the rate of velocity in relative space. The illusion of time seems to progress linearly for everyone who visits this physical reality, when in truth it's all a single eternal moment.

As if all of this wasn't enough to grapple with, the invention of prisons has given us the diabolical concept of 'doing' time.

- That's old convict jargon for time being done to a person as punishment for a crime. I find this notion the worst kind of self-abuse a society can inflict on itself. Sure, I experience time like most people in the world. It seems to crawl when I observe it, and slips away all too fast when I look away. And people I love have left the world all too soon.

Bobby says there can be great discomfort experienced in the subjective passage of time, but none worse than the pain from deprivation of normal social connections and creative opportunity.

- If my life exemplifies only one thing, it's that I've absolutely crushed the notion of doing time - or having time done to me. I have not accepted the bizarre idea that my lifetime should be treated as a sentence. This is how I've managed to escape the apparent limitations of my physical confinement and make opportunities and connections most other people I've known in prison seem unable to find. A few have benefited from my example, and hopefully others will find in it some inspiration to seek a brighter path, both inside and outside of prison. That may be my true legacy.

[bbreferencearchive]

Lucifer, Arisen

By Lessley Anderson Wednesday, Nov 17 2004

Bobby BeauSoleil bounds into the visiting room at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute in Pendleton, Ore. His 5-foot-10-inch frame is thin, but he moves with a puffed-out chest and a swaggering stride that make him seem bigger. At 57, BeauSoleil has the handsome, dignified face of a Shakespearean actor, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, bright blue eyes, and imperious cheekbones. He booms, "Namaste!," the greeting of Tibetan monks and New Agers, and hoists himself over a table to get to his seat, rather than walking around it in standard fashion.

In the visiting room, people are seated so close to one another that it is almost impossible to avoid overhearing other conversations. I ask BeauSoleil how he met his wife, Barb. It was a jailhouse marriage that has, nonetheless, persisted happily for 22 years. I figure it's a topic that won't get him in trouble if anybody overhears us talking.

BeauSoleil gets an intense look on his face. "Before we could consummate our relationship, I was almost killed," he says in a voice that projects over the entire room.

I steal a peek at the tweaker-looking inmate sitting next to us and can tell he's trying his best not to eavesdrop.

A guy with a 10-year-old vendetta, BeauSoleil continues, sneaked up behind him and stabbed him in the back, through the lung.

Now the young couple to my left, who've been holding hands and staring tragically into each other's eyes, are obviously listening.

"I turned around, and he stuck me again, through the heart," BeauSoleil says.

The guards pull BeauSoleil into a hallway. I see him posturing angrily, then grinning and making cajoling gestures. He returns.

"I guess I was talking too loud," he says, loudly. "They said it might be a 'security concern.'"

He continues the story in a voice that rises in volume to again include the entire room.

"It was a miracle recovery!" he ends, triumphantly.

The performance is pure BeauSoleil. All his life he's been a rebel -- sometimes to his own detriment. In his 20s, he was a vagabond hippie musician bent on living outside mainstream society. He fell in with a seedy crowd that included Charles Manson and a motorcycle gang called the Straight Satans. Then he stabbed a man to death, partly to prove himself to Manson. The murder landed him in prison for life, labeling him as a "Manson Family" member, even though he says he was not. Ever since, BeauSoleil has been trying to re-establish himself as the artist he was before he made the biggest mistake of his life. He's done so in a typically risky fashion.

In 1977, with the consent of prison officials, BeauSoleil composed and recorded the soundtrack to a film called Lucifer Rising. It is an esoteric work made by iconic underground director Kenneth Anger to celebrate Anger's interest in black magic and the occult. As a vehicle for BeauSoleil's comeback as a serious artist, it was an odd choice. The film is arguably satanic, an acid trip-like homage to the mythical Lucifer, the fallen angel. Rather than attract attention to BeauSoleil's talents, the project had the potential to marginalize him further, as a dangerous character from the hippie fringe.

But it didn't.

After being ignored for 24 years, the soundtrack was released on CD in June and found a receptive audience. Music critics in the United States and Britain have noted that Lucifer Rising, the soundtrack, stands alone as a moving piece of music. As interesting as the work itself is the bizarre story of how it got made. It's an epic tale that begins on the decadent edges of the late-1960s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It contains moments as arcane and darkly comic as anything Anger ever filmed. In many ways, it is a -- perhaps the -- quintessential story of modern San Francisco.

BeauSoleil was never a joiner. Born in 1947 to a middle-class family in Santa Barbara, he came of age during the height of surfing culture but refused to surf. Instead, he taught himself guitar, greased his hair, listened to rockabilly music, and landed in reform school. At 16 he dropped out and moved to Los Angeles, where he grew his hair long, discovered LSD, and got a gig playing in a band called the Grass Roots, which would later be renamed Love.

Translated from the French, BeauSoleil's name means "beautiful sun." It fit him to a T. He was poetic and slightly androgynous, with long, glossy auburn hair and freckles. He dressed like an elegant tramp in a top hat, knee-high moccasins, and frock coat.

"I never considered myself a hippie," BeauSoleil says. "I was a bohemian."

Some called him Bobby Snofox, after the big white Samoyed that was his constant companion. Others called him Cupid, because he was a chick magnet; he'd sleep with one girl, crash at her apartment, then move on to the next. "I was so uncomfortable with myself, I couldn't be with somebody long term," says BeauSoleil.

Just shy of his 18th birthday, BeauSoleil moved to San Francisco to check out the burgeoning music scene.

"To one who until just a few months earlier had been in the choking grip of the glitz and stucco squalor of the greater Los Angeles area, being absorbed by the rollicking energy and rich ambiance of San Francisco was like being dipped in mothers milk," BeauSoleil wrote recently in the liner notes of a yet-to-be-released collection of his early recordings. "It seemed an enchanted place to me. To this day it remains the only city I have ever truly loved."

In 1966, the Haight-Ashbury was still a low-rent, mostly black neighborhood. It had only recently been colonized by little pockets of white artists and musicians, such as the Grateful Dead and the activist-performance group the Diggers. BeauSoleil fit right in.

He got a job playing lead guitar in the Outfit, a group whose management was trying to market it as a boy band for teenage girls. The gig didn't last long. (BeauSoleil says he "upstaged" the rest of the group and they were jealous; the band's former rhythm guitarist, Bob Resner, says BeauSoleil was "untrustworthy" and was asked to leave.)

BeauSoleil became a Haight-Ashbury character, with a mixed reputation. He was opinionated, driven, and arrogant, say those who knew him. "He was like Bugs Bunny," says a friend from that time, Nathan Zakheim. "Very in your face, enthusiastic."

Others, though, called him Bummer Bob and viewed him as a manipulative scammer. "He skated through life getting what he could out of people," says Bob Resner's cousin Hillel Resner, who owned a Haight Street concert hall, the Straight Theater.

In any case, nobody denies that young BeauSoleil had a musical vision and was determined to see it play out. After the Outfit, he traded his electric guitar for a sitar and a Turkish bouzouki and began recruiting musicians to be in what he envisioned as an electrified symphony orchestra. It was an unusual idea for the time and the neighborhood. Most bands played rock 'n' roll or some version of the blues and featured a vocalist. But BeauSoleil threw himself into the project, and eventually recruited a stand-up bass player, a drummer, a violinist, and an oboist; he played guitar and bouzouki. The band named itself the Orkustra.

"I called it 'raga rock,'" says the violinist, David LaFlamme. "What we were doing was so different that nobody really understood it. But Bobby would hound you to death until he got what he wanted."

Thanks in part to BeauSoleil's persistence, the Orkustra eventually shared the stage with big-name bands such as the Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield, but it never recorded an album. Most of the time the group gigged in the Panhandle, as part of the Diggers' free concerts. In 1967, the Diggers planned a weekend-long "happening" at -- of all places -- Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. Billed as "The Invisible Circus," the event was to include a 24-hour free printing press, poetry readings, music, and lectures. Former Digger Peter Berg remembers, "We wanted to liberate the city in every possible way."

BeauSoleil's band was on the bill for Friday evening.

In the late 1960s, Kenneth Anger rivaled Andy Warhol as the hippest avant-garde film director in America. Clubs in New York and San Francisco were fond of showing three of his movies at a time to audiences of psychedelic trippers. His work was impressionistic and often racy; it featured quick cuts of provocative images set to interesting musical soundtracks, with no dialogue. He is widely seen as having unwittingly fathered the music video. In his most commercially successful film, 1963's Scorpio Rising, gooey '50s pop songs are paired with fetishistic scenes of leather bikers.

Openly gay, prone to wild mood swings, constantly on the edge of financial insolvency, Anger was an infamous eccentric. He publicly idolized Aleister Crowley, a turn-of-the-century British occultist often credited with giving birth to modern Satanism. Crowley believed the world was governed by a series of ages personified by different gods and goddesses. His own age, represented in the Western world by Jesus Christ or the Egyptian god Osiris, was coming to an end, according to Crowley. On the rise was the age of Horus, or Lucifer.

Like the mythical Lucifer, angel of light, who rebelled against God and was cast down to hell, people in this new age would discover their true natures, turn against polite society, and throw the world into chaos and ugliness. After that, however, harmony would return, and Lucifer/Horus would be restored to his rightful place in heaven. There was only one rule for this new age, wrote Crowley: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Anger refused to be interviewed for this story. After I left a message on his home answering machine, asking if I could buy him dinner and talk about Lucifer Rising, he left a return message. "If you want to talk to me, you better do it quickly, because I'm leaving for Europe," he began. "Lessley. That's an ambiguous name, Lessley. I don't know if you meant to be ambiguous, but it's very ambiguous. However, that's not what offended me. O-f-f-e-n-d-e-d. What offended me was your cheap offer to buy me dinner! You made the wrong move, lady!"

When I called him back, he hung up on me and did not return a third call.

According to the unauthorized biography Anger, the filmmaker wanted to make a movie about the dawning of the age of Horus through the lens of the psychedelic 1960s youth culture. It was to be called Lucifer Rising. Like many aspects of Anger's life, the project took bizarre, tragic twists. His first candidate to play Lucifer, a 5-year-old boy whose hippie parents had been fixtures on the Los Angeles counterculture scene, fell through a skylight to his death. By 1967, Anger had relocated to San Francisco and was searching for a new Lucifer.

He set up shop with two other filmmakers in a peeling, leaky Victorian mansion on one corner of Alamo Square. He painted the words "Do What Thou Wilt" on the front door in red paint. Among his circle of friends was Anton LaVey, a former saloon organ player who wore devil horns on his bald head; walked his pet lion, Tagore, around the streets of San Francisco; and would later found the Church of Satan.

The Anger-LaVey crowd and the Haight Street hippies didn't mingle much.

"Kenneth Anger was weird and creepy," opines Howard Kerr, who was part of a hippie comedy act called the Congress of Wonders. "We were eating ginger ice cream in North Beach, and he said, 'I want you to come home with me and do a magic ritual.' I said, 'What is the purpose?,' and he said, 'Take off my clothes and pierce me with sharp things.'"

"We were clean crazies, they were perverted crazies," says Jaime Leopold, the Orkustra's bass player. But sometimes the lines weren't so clearly drawn.

On a Friday evening in February 1967, more than 10,000 people descended on Glide Memorial for "The Invisible Circus." News of the event had spread mostly by word-of-mouth, and by early evening, the sidewalk in front of the church was packed. Inside, one could barely make one's way through the crush of sweating, tripping young people. In his autobiography, I'm Alive, a young Rev. Cecil Williams remembers getting a frantic call at home as the event quickly spun, as he saw it, out of control.

"I waded through the corridors of flesh ... bodies were everywhere ... freak-outs and laughter and crying jags and rubbing and grabbing and slumped piles of quicksand or a tidal wave rolling and roaring with an energy nothing but time could stop ...," wrote a horrified Williams. (Later that night, Williams helped cut "The Invisible Circus" short and move the crowd to Baker Beach.)

Inside one of the church halls, the Diggers set up a fake wall made of newsprint on which they projected pictures of planet Earth. With a clash of cymbals, a team of amateur topless belly dancers burst through the paper, followed by the Orkustra, playing an Egyptian-tinged jam.

As the girls shimmied, the audience rose to its feet and danced with them. Bobby BeauSoleil grabbed a chair and lifted a blond belly dancer onto it.

"We started doing a sort of dance where I was playing specifically to what she was doing, and she was dancing specifically to what I was playing," says BeauSoleil. "It was beautiful. It was spontaneous and fun. I had no idea what anyone else was doing, or if anyone was tuned in to what we were doing."

Then he began licking the sweat off her breasts.

The performance made an impression on at least one member of the audience. Later that evening, as BeauSoleil was packing up his equipment, a tall man with black hair approached him in the darkness. Without so much as an introduction, he pointed a finger at BeauSoleil and declared, "You are Lucifer!" Anger had found his new leading man.

BeauSoleil hadn't recognized Anger and, though he'd heard of him, had never seen any of his movies. When it was explained to him, the prospect of starring as the fallen angel in an art film appealed to BeauSoleil immensely. With one stipulation: The young guitar player would take on the role of Lucifer if he was allowed to make the movie's soundtrack. Anger agreed.

BeauSoleil moved in with Anger. He put his bed in the front parlor, on top of old pillars that had once been part of another Victorian house, and painted bright murals on his walls. Anger lived in the rear of the flat, which he'd painted black with silver dots. A mirrored ball hung from the ceiling; when lit, it reflected light off the dots, giving the walls the appearance of studded black leather.

Though BeauSoleil denies having been Anger's lover, which was the rumor going around Haight Street at the time, in all other ways their relationship seemed one of sugar daddy and boy toy. Anger let BeauSoleil live rent-free. He also bought BeauSoleil a Studebaker truck that had been sawed in half with the back replaced by a funny little camper built to look like a log cabin. One day Anger gave his fallen angel a stone wing that had come from a broken statue.

"It was an odd relationship," admits BeauSoleil. "He was fascinated by me ... I'm not gay, and I was not interested in him in that way."

As in most Anger productions, filming was low budget and sporadic. On one occasion, Anger hired a light show to drench BeauSoleil's naked torso with zebra patterns as he stood in front of black velvet, raising and lowering his arms. Another time Anger filmed his Lucifer smoking a joint from a skull-shaped roach clip contraption.

BeauSoleil's new living arrangement didn't bode well for his band.

"It was a psycho scene, quite frankly," says the violinist, LaFlamme. "Kenneth Anger was a nut case, and Bobby was getting nuttier, and with these other people hanging around, it just wasn't a healthy working environment."

When the bassist, Leopold, was jailed on a pot bust, the Orkustra fell apart. BeauSoleil quickly assembled a new band from the growing numbers of Haight Street musicians and called it the Magick Powerhouse of Oz. The group began rehearsing moody, modal jams that BeauSoleil anticipated would form the basis of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack. Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way.

In September 1967, BeauSoleil and Anger put together a show at the Straight Theater. "The Equinox of the Gods," as the event was billed, was meant to be a kind of buzz-builder for the film. Footage Anger had shot of BeauSoleil would be shown, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz would play, the Congress of Wonders would do a comedy routine. As the climax, Anger would perform a Crowley invocation to summon the gods of the autumnal equinox.

The night of the performance, BeauSoleil says, Anger took LSD.

"He was really ripped," says Howard Kerr, of the Congress of Wonders.

The Straight was packed. Anton LaVey sat in the balcony. In the beginning, everything went according to plan. The band did its set, the Congress made the room laugh, then Anger launched into his invocation. He ran around the dance floor area below the stage, waving some striped fabric and wielding -- by some accounts a cane, by others a rattle -- as if it were a magic wand. Then things went horribly wrong.

There was a soundtrack playing behind Anger, recalls BeauSoleil, and at some point in the invocation it broke down. Others who were there don't remember this, but nobody has forgotten what happened next. Anger became extremely agitated, screamed, "I love you!," and hurled his makeshift wand into the audience. It hit Gabe Katz, a former editor of the Haight Street newspaper the Oracle, in the forehead. The blow tore open Katz's skin, and blood gushed over his face. The room went to chaos.

According to BeauSoleil, Anger was convinced his young protégé had had something to do with the soundtrack's malfunction. In any case, that evening marked the end of their partnership. BeauSoleil returned home a few days later to find the locks changed, his truck disassembled, and his murals painted over in white. He kicked down the front door, retrieved his things, and put his car back together. Anger filed a complaint that resulted in a warrant for BeauSoleil's arrest; the filmmaker claimed that BeauSoleil had stolen belongings from him, including the footage of Lucifer Rising. BeauSoleil denies this. The bad vibes were heavy; BeauSoleil beat a retreat to Los Angeles.

"Kenneth Anger came back to the theater the next day and put hexes on everything and cursed everything," says Luther Green, who ran the film projections at the Straight Theater. "Some people hung garlic in there afterwards."

People who knew the two say Anger also put a hex on BeauSoleil. Considering what happened next, it's tempting to believe in such things.

Bobby BeauSoleil met Charles Manson in 1967 at a house party in Topanga Canyon. Though Manson was 13 years older than the 20-year-old BeauSoleil, the two connected, both musically and personally. Manson had his guitar that evening, and BeauSoleil jammed with him on an instrument called a melodica (like a harmonica, but with keys). Later that year, BeauSoleil joined Manson's garage band, the Milky Way.

Manson always had girls hanging around him, and at that time they traveled from crash pad to crash pad in a black school bus. They weren't viewed as a cult, but rather a commune of sorts that showed up at parties right alongside entertainment-industry types, including Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Needless to say, Manson and friends had not yet gone on their infamous killing spree.

Like Wilson and others, BeauSoleil viewed Manson as a talented songwriter, à la Bob Dylan. He also looked up to Manson. "I saw him as the ultimate free-spirited iconoclast," says BeauSoleil.

When the Milky Way split up after only one gig, BeauSoleil went on the road with a few girlfriends in tow. "I was in escape mode," says BeauSoleil. "I was disgusted with the scene, the music business, the society and government of this country. I had these weird visions of sailing away to Jamaica and living on the beach and eating lobster."

In the beginning of 1969, BeauSoleil moved to a little apartment in Laurel Canyon. Manson's group had moved onto an old western movie set in Topanga Canyon called the Spahn Movie Ranch.

"There was this sense when you visited whether you were 'in' or not. I was always on visitor status," says BeauSoleil, disputing the myth that he was part of Manson's so-called Family. "Spahn Ranch was a really fun place. It was on the fringes, and at that point the cops weren't bothering them so much. It was fun to go out there on the weekend and drink beer with the bikers."

Members of a local motorcycle gang, the Straight Satans, sometimes dropped by the ranch. BeauSoleil, who was feeling "depressed and drifting," began to idealize their seemingly free, rebellious lifestyle.

The actual facts of how and why BeauSoleil killed Gary Hinman, a music teacher and associate of the Manson crowd, will probably forever remain a mystery. Some of BeauSoleil's version of the events can be corroborated by the testimony of Danny DeCarlo, a Straight Satan who claimed BeauSoleil confessed to him and who testified at BeauSoleil's first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Some cannot. According to BeauSoleil (who denies confessing to DeCarlo and who claims DeCarlo got his information from one of BeauSoleil's accomplices), the nightmare started when the Straight Satans asked him to buy them some mescaline, and BeauSoleil scored from Hinman. Then, says BeauSoleil, he found out from the gang that the drugs had been "bunk." When BeauSoleil returned to Hinman's with two of Manson's girlfriends, he says, it was to try to get the money back for the Satans.

According to both BeauSoleil and DeCarlo's testimony, BeauSoleil held a gun to Hinman, then pistol-whipped him. The music teacher insisted he had no money, BeauSoleil says, and one of the girls telephoned Manson during the scuffle. Hinman had already agreed to sign over ownership of his two junker cars, BeauSoleil says, when there was a knock at the door. According to both BeauSoleil and DeCarlo, Manson rushed in and slashed Hinman's face with a small sword, splitting his ear.

"I heard Manson say something to me like, 'That's how you be a man,'" BeauSoleil said in a revealing interview with writer/ musician Michael Moynihan in Seconds magazine.

Manson left, and, panicking, BeauSoleil says he tried to sew up Hinman's face with dental floss. "I knew he'd tell them what happened if he went to the hospital," says BeauSoleil. "I was trying to tell him, 'Gary, it will heal, you don't have to go to the hospital.' But he was freaking out -- for obvious reasons -- worried about infection ... he was going to have a scar for life."

BeauSoleil dialed Manson again, screaming at him for leaving him in such a terrible position.

"Well, you know what to do as well as I do," Manson told him, according to DeCarlo and BeauSoleil.

"I kind of had to screw up my courage," BeauSoleil says. "I went outside and paced. I freaked out. Just freaked out. There wasn't anybody in the room when I stabbed him. I rushed at him. I stabbed him once, and he didn't fall. Then I did it again, and he did."

In DeCarlo's version of things, there was no drug burn; BeauSoleil and the girls just wanted money, and Hinman wasn't cooperating. It was BeauSoleil, DeCarlo told investigators, who called Manson the first time, complaining Hinman wouldn't give it up.

In a clumsy attempt to make the police think one of Hinman's radical lefty friends had done him in, a member of the trio (BeauSoleil says he can't remember who) scrawled "political piggies" on the wall in blood before leaving. Ten days later, BeauSoleil was arrested driving one of the dead man's cars with the murder weapon in the rear wheel well.

The Tate-LaBianca murders went down within three days of BeauSoleil's arrest. Some speculate the motive for the murders was to free BeauSoleil, by making it look like Hinman's "real" killer had struck again. On the wall of the LaBiancas' house, police found the word "piggies" written in blood.

BeauSoleil was eventually sentenced to death for the murder. When California repealed the death penalty in 1972, BeauSoleil's sentence was commuted to life in prison. In every book, movie, and television show about the Manson Family, BeauSoleil would forever be linked to the most gruesome killing spree of his era. This frustrated him to no end. After all, he wasn't involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders and had had a legitimate career as a musician before his crime.

"What's heartbreaking to me more than anything else is that killing Gary Hinman has negated all of my creative efforts," BeauSoleil said in a 1981 interview in Oui magazine. "(The world) doesn't concentrate on anything other than that one mistake I made in my life."

In the mid-1970s, BeauSoleil had gone from a 22-year-old kid who was, as he puts it, "too damn pretty for prison" to a tough-looking 29-year-old covered in tattoos, including the word "Lucifer," which he'd inked across his chest using a broken guitar string. He'd been laid up in the hospital after getting knocked in the head with a baseball bat during a melee at San Quentin. Coincidentally, Kenneth Anger got the same tattoo in nearly the exact same place a few years later. It's improbable either of them knew of the other's.

In 1976, while an inmate at Dueul Correctional Institute in Tracy, BeauSoleil learned that Lucifer Rising, the movie, was still unfinished. He and Anger hadn't spoken since the night of "Equinox of the Gods," though Anger had sent BeauSoleil a postcard when he was on death row. It was in an Egyptian motif and depicted a harpist playing to Horus; it read, "They also serve those who sit and wait."

One day BeauSoleil read in a magazine that Anger had hired Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to do the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.

"I felt that it was mine," says BeauSoleil. He wrote to Anger asking if he could take over.

Page and Anger were on the outs by that point, and Anger agreed to let BeauSoleil take a crack. BeauSoleil wrote the warden, the now-deceased R.M. Dees, for permission to work on the project in prison. "I'm not going to stand in the way of a guy making a buck," BeauSoleil remembers the warden saying.

BeauSoleil recruited other inmates for his band, which he called the Freedom Orchestra. One, strangely enough, was a Manson Family associate named Steve Grogan. BeauSoleil went about the project as zealously as if his life depended on it, and in a sense, it did. "Here I am in prison, stripped of ostensibly everything, and I had begun to rebuild myself," says BeauSoleil. "[I thought,] 'This reality does not define me. I'm still rockin'!'"

Anger sent an unfinished black-and-white version of Lucifer Rising, and one evening BeauSoleil screened it in (of all places) the prison chapel. The footage Anger had shot of BeauSoleil in the late 1960s was gone, much of it used in an earlier film called Invocation [of My Demon Brother]. The men saw a montage of primordial, mysterious images. A volcano bubbles lava. The Egyptian god Osiris and goddess Isis lift staffs to the heavens. An elephant stomps a cobra. A Magus magician figure enacts a bloody ritual around a circle to resurrect Lucifer. People carry a torch through the mountains. Marianne Faithfull, as Lilith, goddess of destruction, walks along the Nile and among the pyramids at Gîza.

"To them it was just weird images put together," BeauSoleil says of his fellow inmates. To BeauSoleil it was something personal.

"I recognized myself in the central character, being something of a fallen one myself," says BeauSoleil. "The mythology of it perfectly coincided with what was going on in my own life at the time. Lucifer's punishment was that he was exiled and cut off from the beloved, which was my pain."

"I was struggling," BeauSoleil continues. "I needed to demonstrate to myself that I was not dead or destroyed."

BeauSoleil began to compose an ambitious electronic symphony in his head that would carry the listener through painful dark places and loneliness, then end on a hopeful note. With $3,000 Anger sent to a teacher at the prison, BeauSoleil bought microphones, a four-track recorder, an open-reel tape deck, a six-channel mixer, a drum set, and a PA system. He found a battered trumpet under the prison gym bleachers. Then he built the rest of the instruments and electronics himself.

He constructed Grogan's guitar, a bass, and then, because each inmate was allowed to have only one instrument, a double-necked guitar for himself, one neck for the bass strings. After taking an electronics course through a local community college, he built synthesizers, a reverb unit, and amplifiers, some from kits, some from scratch.

The soundtrack took three years to finish. The Freedom Orchestra's members kept getting paroled or transferred to other prisons. There were other problems, too. The prison convulsed in a series of riots, during which the inmates were locked in their cells and denied access to the music room. Finally BeauSoleil was granted permission to move some of the equipment into his cell. He edited the tapes using a razor blade.

In 1980 he sent the finished soundtrack to Anger.

It starts in a broiling, roiling, cosmic fugue, windlike blasts from a synthesizer, an anxious chorus of strings, then a Middle Eastern-sounding bass riff in a minor key. The listener feels as if he's suddenly been cast alone into a vast inhospitable landscape that's about to be obliterated by a natural disaster. Then suddenly the noise cuts out, and a lone trumpet begins to play the Lucifer Rising theme -- a melancholy reverie with echoes of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western scores.

The soundtrack winds its way through desolate atonal reverberations on synthesizers and organs that collect into beautiful, sad, music box-like melodies. It erupts in a Pink Floyd-esque guitar jam with clashing cymbals. This becomes a repetitive dirge of cascading notes from an organ and trumpet. The last part of the composition sounds like supernatural circus music that starts out deranged and wicked and ends triumphantly amid the crash of waves. The Lucifer Rising soundtrack is troubled, passionate, and grieving. Its power is greater knowing that BeauSoleil created it on such crude equipment, in prison.

When the Lucifer Rising film debuted, BeauSoleil's musical odyssey seemed to come to an anticlimactic end. During a modest run of mostly art museums and film schools, the movie and soundtrack received little attention. A Canadian label, Lethal Records ("I didn't much like the name," gripes BeauSoleil), pressed 1,000 records that quickly fell out of circulation. There was a single review in an obscure newspaper in Canada.

BeauSoleil had one last contact with Anger after the film's release. The director came to visit him, looking dapper in a gray corduroy three-piece suit.

"There was never any other Lucifer, you know," he told BeauSoleil.

But their relationship remained tortured. Shortly thereafter, BeauSoleil stumbled upon a magazine article in which Anger again accused BeauSoleil of stealing the original Lucifer Rising footage.

"There was never any film to steal, except for the footage that wound up in Invocation [of My Demon Brother]," says BeauSoleil angrily. "But he kept telling that lie so often, I think he started to believe it."

As he entered middle age, BeauSoleil took comfort where he could find it. In 1980, he married in order to enjoy the conjugal visits then afforded lifers. He quickly realized he'd made a mistake and had the marriage annulled. He married again in 1982, to a woman named Barbara, who had written him a letter after seeing a television segment about BeauSoleil's music program at Dueul. After surviving his near-death stabbing that same year, he is still happily married to Barb, a belly dance teacher and graphic designer who lives in Salem, Ore.

With the advent of the Internet, BeauSoleil began selling CDs of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack, along with a few pieces he recorded later, from a Web site Barb helped him create. He didn't sell very many. He did, however, get a lot of e-mails asking him about Manson.

Then, in 2000, BeauSoleil was contacted by a DVD producer who wanted to interview him for a compilation of Anger films. Though the film part of the project stalled, one of the producers struck a deal with BeauSoleil to release the Lucifer Rising soundtrack on his music label, Arcanum Records. This past summer a remastered double CD of the soundtrack, paired with recovered bootleg recordings of the Orkustra and the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, hit national record stores.

"There are so many archival projects being reissued and dug up, and a lot of them don't deliver," says Bob Mehr, music critic at the Chicago Reader and contributor to Mojo magazine. "This one is one instance of a pretty evocative piece of music. ... It was a project that had been festering in BeauSoleil's head for a long time, and it definitely shows."

Dave Tompkins, a critic at the Village Voice, declared, "It's nuts! It's evil in parts, but it's not just pure evil, where you're limited to that one emotion or feeling. It's also like walking down autumn roads, alone. That kind of vibe."

Vice magazine proclaimed Lucifer Rising "the reissue of the year" and called it "a scary and loose free rock soundtrack."

A British music magazine, The Wire, described the soundtrack as "a wide-ranging hybrid of Prog rock, hippie jam, shimmering Terry Riley-esque keyboards, and bombastic swellings ... a cloudy musical mystery grown organically from simple sources." It went on to say that the CD proved that "wherever fate led him, BeauSoleil's creative powers persisted."

Jay Babcock, editor of the Los Angeles music magazine Arthur, writes in an e-mail that the CD is an office favorite. "It's the dark clouds," writes Babcock, "plus the silver lining."

Twenty-four years after the fact, BeauSoleil's attempts to redeem himself had finally panned out, at least in his mind.

BeauSoleil says he's "certain" he'll get out one day, and it's clear, at least, that he has behaved in prison.

According to California corrections officials, who share BeauSoleil with the Oregon Department of Corrections through something known as an "interstate compact agreement," BeauSoleil has been a model prisoner for years. BeauSoleil's death sentence was commuted to life at a time when there was no provision for life in prison without parole. His disciplinary record is clean, and many who've worked with him feel he's been rehabilitated.

"[BeauSoleil] readily accepts responsibility for his role in [his crime] without equivocation," wrote his prison counselor in a report submitted at BeauSoleil's 2003 parole hearing. In that same report, a former supervisor called him a "remarkable inmate." Besides starting the music program at Dueul for the purpose of his Lucifer Rising project, BeauSoleil went on to create a video program at a subsequent prison, where he made documentaries about prison life. He has counseled disadvantaged youth and is a visual artist who has (besides his tattoos) produced a body of painstakingly detailed paintings and drawings.

A psychologist wrote that, "His behavior has become increasingly oriented toward art and creativity, rather than destructiveness. ... There would not appear to be any psychiatric contradictions to parole of any kind."

In 2003, however, as in times past, BeauSoleil was denied parole.

His lawyer, Carrie Hagin, says, "They're hung up on the whole Manson thing."

Others, however, have a decidedly less sympathetic view of BeauSoleil.

"Victim Hinman was tortured over a period of two days ... before BeauSoleil finally stabbed him," said Frank Merriman, then-captain of the Homicide Bureau for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, in a letter to the parole board in 2003. "It's the opinion of this department that parole is inappropriate and should be denied."

BeauSoleil is aware that the release of the Lucifer Rising CD and its attendant publicity may not do much to rehabilitate his image in the eyes of the parole board.

"I know some people think that Lucifer Rising, because of the title, has something to do with the devil, and that invites certain perceptions," he says. But, says BeauSoleil, the soundtrack, its history, and even the archetype of Lucifer are all a part of him. He has made a life for himself in prison the only way he knows how.

"I've tried to be conformist ... but deep down I was not empowered within myself," says BeauSoleil.

During our visit at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute, BeauSoleil has been unflaggingly chipper. But when I ask him why he wanted, so badly, to do the Lucifer Rising soundtrack, he suddenly looks distressed.

"I was using Kenneth," he says. "I needed something to work on."

I'm surprised to see this 57-year-old man, 35 years in prison, begin to tear up. He makes a fist and hunches forward, his entire body vibrating with sorrow and frustration.

"I'm an artist," he sputters hoarsely. He pulls his fist to his heart for emphasis and in doing so accidentally slams the wall behind him with his elbow. He seems oblivious to the guards hovering around us.

"They ... can't ... do me."

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Interview for Bardo Methodology, Pt. 1

by Niklas Göransson

Musician, writer and visual artist; Bobby BeauSoleil is also serving a life sentence in prison. His tale is one of being condemned to die, of cultivating spirituality in nightmarish surroundings, and drawing upon the arcane to survive hell.

This is an excerpt from the full article –  which is twice as long, significantly more in-depth, and featured in Bardo Methodology #2.

Bobby BeauSoleil presently resides within the California penitentiary system. Having initially been handed the death penalty, he’s currently sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for a homicide connected to the so-called Manson Family. This case is heavily documented elsewhere, so we shall waste no time on it. I have the pleasure of introducing to you an artist in every conceivable sense of the word, one who should not be defined by poor choices made fifty years ago.

– I was a mess when they brought me to the San Quentin Death Row. Maintaining sanity was already a lost cause by that point; two trials, a year in the Los Angeles County Jail, and exposure to all the hysteria and madness around Charlie Manson had put me through the wringer. Worst of all was the burden of the crime I had committed.

In April 1970, Bobby BeauSoleil was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to die. Two years later, the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty statute unconstitutional, following which his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

– The shame of having killed a decent man for reasons which cannot be justified as honourable weighed heavily on me. I had dishonoured myself, my family and many other people I cared about – and at that point I hadn’t even begun to come to terms with the personal consequences for what I’d done. The problem with shame is that it’s so debilitating, nothing much happens in that state; it mesmerises the mind, rendering self-actuated thought nearly impossible.

To make matters worse, this sort of mental stasis is for the most part reinforced by the prison environment.

– What ultimately saved me was the epiphany that imprisonment is a state of mind. Prisons by their very design serve to reduce the incarcerated to powerlessness, to hold them in place not only physically but mentally and emotionally as well. Only by connecting to one’s spiritual centre does any kind of liberation become possible.

How does one forgive oneself for something like this then, can it be done?

– Given a little nourishment, the mind will eventually loosen its grip on shame. This reveals the guilt, of course, which is only a marginal improvement but at least allows a bit of wiggle-room in beginning the process of accounting for oneself.

Being in the position Bobby was at the time – a handsome young man, a gifted musician with his whole life ahead of him but incarcerated in what by all accounts sounds like a fairly unsavoury milieu; I’m thinking it must have required immense mental strength to not only keep it together but also make something positive out of the situation.

– Willpower is overrated. I tried for years to give up cigarettes using willpower alone – multiple times, and it didn’t work. What I’ve discovered is that breaking old habits or achieving personal goals has more to do with self-identification than determination, at least in my case. Once I realised how being subordinate to an external substance is not who I am, that was it; nicotine no longer had a hold on me.

At that point, willpower and determination became allies in dissolving a habit no longer serving him.

– I have applied this principle many times throughout my life. Long ago, I decided that prison and the criminal label that comes attached to it would not define me. I will not allow myself to internally identify as one who is imprisoned. I am the expression of freedom itself, regardless of external circumstance. Willpower comes into play only as a helpful tool for maintaining resolve.

Bobby is quite understandably a bit wary of interviews, following a disastrous one in the seventies when an American writer called Truman Capote visited him in San Quentin. A well-known author, playwright and actor who had his peak in the fifties and sixties, Capote’s work has spawned more than twenty films and television dramas. He died in 1984, at fifty-nine years of age.

– When I recently read in a biography that Capote had routinely exploited his subjects, it came as no surprise to me. At the time I agreed to meet with him, in late 1972 or early ‘73, I was completely ignorant of his approach to journalism and hadn’t read anything he’d written. My decision to speak with him was foolish, predictably so because I made it while clinging to the hope that such a famous writer might bring some advocacy to my cause.

As Bobby himself learned, desperate needs often result in poor decisions.

– I made a bunch of bad choices during that period of my life. Reportedly, Capote did not take notes – claiming to have an infallible memory despite the alcoholism that’s been noted as a prominent feature of his story. Little wonder how the version of our conversation he published in his 1980 Music for Chameleons book bears only marginal resemblance to the original interview.

There is a notable comment in the article which I believe Bobby has verified as authentic, although not quite in the context it was used: ‘Everything in life is good. It all flows. It’s all good. It’s all music.’

– The statement you’ve quoted comes fairly close to one of the remarks I made to him, though paraphrased. What had been an attempt at describing my fledgling spiritual philosophy was in Capote’s fictionalised interview piece framed in the context of a vague rationalisation for murder. I rather stupidly walked into that one. At the time, I was unaware of his fetishist penchant for having his readers perceive him in the company of young male killers. History is written by fools, and it’s our own fault for being so gullible. Truman Capote was one of those writers who helped make fake news the new normal. Enough said about him.

Bobby explains that statements such as ‘Life just flows; it’s all good.’ work only if attributed to the ‘eternal witness as existence itself’.

– From the perspective of an individual soul undergoing the human condition, such a statement seems like one only an insane person would make. Of course, there are many things we experience as bad; pain, fear, violence, war, disease, death. We can all agree that victimisation is evil – no argument from me there, speaking from the humanity we all hold in common.

Only through identification with the eternal does it become possible to understand, he decrees, that things we experience as negative or evil while we dwell in worldly conditions are fleeting and transitory, and therefore unreal.

– They are in no way a stain on the innate goodness of one’s existence as the divine. From this standpoint, it becomes possible to find peace even in the midst of incredible turmoil. This is how I survived hell.

 On that note, Bobby’s parole was denied once again on October 14, 2016.

– I’ve been before the parole authorities for consideration on roughly twenty occasions in the past forty-seven years. Actually, so many times that me and the parole board both have lost accurate count. A quick glance at U.S. incarceration statistics will reveal the insanity of the currently existing criminal justice system.

He says this has little to do with its stated purpose of preserving public safety, and is driven by socio-political-economic forces.

– Of course, my one-time affiliation with some disreputable persons contributes additional wrinkles which from the standpoint of someone on the parole board or holding political office makes my case more complicated. Consequently, factors such as good behaviour, vocational accomplishments, community support and other evidence of rehabilitation have had little bearing on outcomes up to this point.

During Bobby’s most recent hearing last year, the parole board assessed the time for his crime to fifteen years.

– This would suggest I’m well overdue for parole given that I’ve served thirty-two years beyond this assessment. In any case, the mere fact that one has finally been made is perhaps indicative of my outlooks for parole having improved. We’ll see what the next hearing brings.

Going through this endless cycle of appeals and denials must be a ghastly emotional roller-coaster?

– Karma is a bitch! The spell I wove for myself when I so thoughtlessly put myself in this situation has become so tangled up with subsequent events that I have as yet contrived the one capable of unravelling and unbinding me. For the meantime, I do what I must to keep my spirit in a good place.

Bobby says that self-pity is a poor companion and a pointless waste of time – he alone is responsible for landing himself in this predicament.

– Learning how to take ownership for consequences, in addition to all the other valuable lessons I’ve received along the way, may well have been worth the sacrifices I purchased when those fateful choices were made so long ago. There’s always the Great Work, and this along with some deep and abiding relationships with friends and family have sustained me through the hard times.

Bobby has been in prison longer than I’ve been alive. At my age, he’d already been locked up almost half his life. As such, time is a concept I suspect we have a profoundly different relationship to.

– Notions about time and the experience of time are an endless playground wherever in the universe one finds oneself. As a musician, I’ve been playing with and cutting up time in various ways nearly all my life, and no doubt many previous lifetimes.

He explains that music is, among other things, the study of how time can be broken into beats – and how the subjective experience of time warps psychologically.

– Time wraps upon itself in a circular manner through all the Yugas like the Buddha’s proverbial river and stretches in Einsteinian fashion depending on the rate of velocity in relative space. The illusion of time seems to progress linearly for everyone who visits this physical reality, when in truth it’s all a single eternal moment.

As if all of this wasn’t enough to grapple with, the invention of prisons has given us the diabolical concept of ‘doing’ time.

– That’s old convict jargon for time being done to a person as punishment for a crime. I find this notion the worst kind of self-abuse a society can inflict on itself. Sure, I experience time like most people in the world. It seems to crawl when I observe it, and slips away all too fast when I look away. And people I love have left the world all too soon.

Bobby says there can be great discomfort experienced in the subjective passage of time, but none worse than the pain from deprivation of normal social connections and creative opportunity.

– If my life exemplifies only one thing, it’s that I’ve absolutely crushed the notion of doing time – or having time done to me. I have not accepted the bizarre idea that my lifetime should be treated as a sentence. This is how I’ve managed to escape the apparent limitations of my physical confinement and make opportunities and connections most other people I’ve known in prison seem unable to find. A few have benefited from my example, and hopefully others will find in it some inspiration to seek a brighter path, both inside and outside of prison. That may be my true legacy.

http://www.bardomethodology.com

[bbreferencearchive]

Final Words

Documentary Film (for Reelz network)

Title: Charles Manson: The Final Words

Written by: James Buddy Day

Produced by Pyramid Productions, Calgary, Canada

 FINAL EDIT SCRIPT, September 9th 2017

EXT. CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON – DAY

 AUTOMATED RECORDING

You have a collect call from ‘Charles’ an inmate in California State Prison, Corcoran, CA, to accept say or dial 5 now. BEEP. 

CHARLES MANSON

Hello.

CHARLES MANSON

They’re still sending me naked pictures of Sharon Tate all stabbed up saying “There’s blood on your hands” and “you did this and you did that.” There’s a lot of ways of crucifying somebody without hanging them on a cross --

AUTOMATED RECORDING

You have sixty seconds remaining.  

CHARLES MANSON

You being a producer it’s like, you kind of got get in the heads of everybody. Have you ever trusted anyone? 

PRODUCER  

Have you? 

CHARLES MANSON

That’s what I’m doing in here.

(laughs)

NARRATOR  

This began a year ago when Charles Manson, a man thought to be the embodiment of evil, started calling. 

CHARLES MANSON

If you can find a way to get me a cell phone where I can use it and call. (yeah). Let me get in the game and you can find a way where we can do what you want to do. But as soon as you get there you’re gonna have 15,000 people who are covering up what they’ve already been stealing and doing. 

NARRATOR  

What do you say to one of the most infamous mass murderers of all time when given the chance? We asked for his story in his own words.   

CHARLES MANSON

I don’t give a fuck about telling my story. My story has already been all over the world, 1,000 times, 1,000 times. You are for you, right. Right on, as long as we understand that, this is not based on friendship, not based on brotherhood, it’s based on guns and knives, it’s based on revolution and war, politics and governments. Survival. 

NARRATOR  

Though decades have passed since his conviction, the obsessive interest has never waned. Manson, of all people, appreciates his notoriety.

CHARLES MANSON

I’m the most famous human being not only that is alive, but the most famous human being that ever lived. And, I’m not even dead yet. – What do you think the fuck is going to happen when I die?

STEPHEN KAY

The problem is Manson is famous. The kids nowadays, they don’t look behind to see what it is he did.

 BLACK.

BOARD – THE CRIMES OF CHARLES MANSON  

NARRATOR  

In the late sixties, Charles Manson was convicted for the brutal murder of actress Sharon Tate and eight others. He was sentenced to death for all of them. When the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in nineteen seventy-two his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

CHARLES MANSON

The reality of it is, beyond the bullshit, is on death row. I’ve already done that been there. The people that haven’t done it and haven’t been there, they don’t understand it, you know, they have no respect for it. I got respect man.

NARRATOR  

Manson’s murder spree took place in the summer of nineteen sixty-nine. It was the peak of the Vietnam war, and a time of civil unrest. It’s said that Charles Manson was the leader of a cult called The Manson Family. They lived outside of society indulging in a constant stream of drugs and sex.  

CHARLES MANSON

We went where nobody had ever went before, not thinking about it, it just, it just happened man. I wasn’t nobody’s leader.

CHARLES MANSON (CONT’D)

All I was doing was fucking everybody I could. The sexual revolution everybody was doing I, was just getting my share that’s all.

NARRATOR  

The first murder took place in July of nineteen sixty-nine. Manson was convicted of ordering three of his disciples to kill an associate in a plot to extort money. After they stabbed the victim to death Manson’s followers wrote on the walls in his blood.

NARRATOR  

A month later the murders escalated.  The official account from the Los Angeles District Attorney is this; Charles Manson sent out more cult members to an isolated house in Beverly Hills with orders to kill everyone inside. It was the home of a beautiful and pregnant movie star named Sharon Tate who was spending the evening with friends.

PHIL KAUFMAN

 (Lived with Manson Family)

How could they drive up to that house, get out and know what their gonna do, nobody was going to leave that house alive. It boggles the mind. He says alright go out and do this and then you’re all in the car together going ok we’re going to do it, nobody says, man should we be doing this? Is Charlie right? They did what they did.

 NARRATOR  

At Charles Manson’s trial the prosecution stated:

 “On the evening of August, the eighth, nineteen sixty-nine, Charles Manson sent his robots out on a mission of murder. There is no evidence that he actually personally killed any of the victims in this case”. 

CHARLES MANSON

If you had to get up and hunt and kill your food every day, you’d be a hell of a warrior man.

NARRATOR

Before they left one of the killers wrote on a door, this time using Sharon Tate’s blood.

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

They wanted to - shock - the public

NEWS FOOTAGE(OS)

In a scene described by investigators as reminiscent of a weird religious ritual, five persons including actress Sharon Tate were found dead. Among the other victims we’re Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring. One officer summed up the murders when he said “In all my years I have never seen anything like this before”.

SHARMAGNE LELAND-ST.JOHN

  (Jay Sebring’s girlfriend)

I was in the kitchen and the phone rang. He said they think Jay and Sharon have just been murdered. I remember just sinking down, I was standing next to the sink and I just sank down to the floor, like I’m melting, I’m melting just, I was stunned. I was shocked, I was in hysterics.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

  (Manson Family Attorney)

When the murders took place, people were buying Gatling guns. The whole town bought guns they we’re frightened to death for months.

SHARMAGNE LELAND-ST.JOHN

  (Jay Sebring’s girlfriend)

But for someone to hang up the phone on their boyfriend and the next morning hear that he’s been brutally murdered with three of his friends, it’s horrifying.

NARRATOR

Manson’s crime spree wasn’t finished. The day after the murder of Sharon Tate and others, Charles Manson took members of his group out again. This time they went to the home to an affluent couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Allegedly, Manson ordered three of his followers to butcher the couple, leaving more messages written in blood.  

CHARLES MANSON

They never lied about me. all the broads said is “I THINK he said go in there and kill those people”. Well she can think a pink elephant, that’s hear-say.

SHARMAGNE LELAND-ST.JOHN

  (Jay Sebring’s girlfriend)

It’s like a horror movie, like those movies where you wonder who’s going to be next.

CHARLES MANSON

People will put the bad mouth on somebody, for all kinds of psychological reasons. Jealousy is a big reason people maneuver.

NARRATOR

When Charles Manson and his family were arrested, and charged, it became the longest and most expensive trial in the history of Los Angeles.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

  (Manson Family Attorney)

The fright in the town was so gigantic and he looked like the devil sitting in court. That trial was like a circus. I mean it was insanity. 

NARRATOR

During in the trial, Manson carved an "X" in his forehead, which he later turned it into a swastika and shaved off all his hair. He says to symbolize his desire to be discarded from society. His followers all did the same.

CHARLES MANSON

They don’t realize that the X on their heads means the head is gone, man. You know, they still think that person’s there because they got a head, you dig? But I took the head. I got it on my belt.  

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with Manson Family)

Every time I went to court, everyday they’d be out there singing ‘Charlie, Charlie’ with the swastikas on their head, shaving their hair. You know that’s not normal, you know looney tunes right there.

NARRATOR

For half a century, Charles Manson’s bizarre behavior has continued, and speculation over his unspeakable crimes has only intensified. But the question has always remained, how did Charles Manson get these people to kill for him?

BLACK.

BOARD – HELTER SKELTER  

CHARLES MANSON

That’s what that stupid -fuckin’ district attorney did, convicted me for the fuckin’ ‘Helter Skelter’ thing that he was thinking. And it took me 40 years to figure out what a cult was.

NARRATOR

When speaking to Charles Manson the topic of Helter Skelter comes up and frequently, and Manson’s answer is always the same. He maintains that Helter Skelter was invented by the prosecution. The Manson Family’s prosecutions were led by Vincent Bugliosi who wrote the book Helter Skelter which became the best-selling true crime book of all time. According to Bugliosi, Helter Skelter, was the name Charles Manson gave to his own bizarre philosophy which he derived from the name of a Beatles Song. 

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

One of their favorite things to do is they would sit around on acid and listen to the Beatles White album. They determined that what the Beatles were doing is they were sending messages to blacks to rise up and start a revolution.

NARRATOR

Manson allegedly convinced his followers that he foresaw the race war prophesized by the Beatles and told them they needed to slaughter white affluent victims to further inspire the black revolution.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative reporter)  

Helter Skelter, a social uprising between the blacks and the whites. The start of a race war. The apocalyptic end, if you will. Charlie and the family will hide underground. They will be the remaining ones left.

NARRATOR

The prosecution claimed that Charles Manson and his followers planned to hide in a secret cave located in Death Valley and wait out the war. When the dust settled, they would emerge and Charles Manson believed he would rebuild of the world.   

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

To say that it was an unusual motive is an understatement. But I can tell you that was the motive. 

SHARMAGNE LELAND-ST.JOHN

  (Jay Sebring’s girlfriend)

Nothing could have been more horrendous than what happened that night to innocent people who didn’t even know their murderers.  And the reasons that this maniac orchestrated this whole thing was just looney tunes.  

CHARLES MANSON

I mean goddamn, this is not what I wanted to be. It doesn’t matter what I wanted.

NARRATOR

Manson insists that he’s been misjudged. He says Helter Skelter is a myth and that the true story behind the murders is one that remains untold.

CHARLES MANSON

And I’ve been deep in thought for almost 40 years, thinking what the hell does all this mean, how does that work? And the stuff that I’ve come up with, it’s just unbelievable, it’s fucking totally unbelievable.

NARRATOR

When speaking to Charles Manson, the most famous mind controlling mass murderer of all time, you have to be careful not to take him at his word. But after months of conversations, questions began to emerge.

CHARLES MANSON

The precious point is that the Helter Skelter that the DA made into what he was doing was wrong basically, when they lose control, they don’t admit that they lost control. They just lost face and they make another movie, like you’re doing. 

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

People who have looked into the case, beyond just a superficial level of reading of Helter Skelter, don’t believe any of that stuff. In fact, most of the media do believe he was trying to start a race war called Helter Skelter, and the whole thing. 

NARRATOR

We spoke with authors, researchers and people who know Manson directly. Charles Manson personally put us in contact with people who know him, others we found on our own. We sought to speak to anyone who was there when the crimes took place, all to unravel what actual happened.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative reporter)  

Back in 1969, we didn’t have access to the police reports, we didn’t have access to autopsy or the FBI files so we’re more inclined to believe the official narrative.

CHARLES MANSON

You’ll find out man. Have a good day, brother man.

BLACK.

BOARD – A CONVERSATION WITH BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

AUTOMATED RECORDING

This is Global Tel Link you have a pre-paid call from ‘Bobby’ an inmate at the California medical Facility, Vacaville California, this call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Hello.

BOARD – BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL, SERVING LIFE SENTENCE FOR FIRST “MANSON FAMILY” MURDER

NARRATOR

Bobby Beausoleil was the first person arrested and accused of being member of the Manson Family. He’s been in prison since nineteen sixty-nine.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

It is extremely important that people understand what happened. We don’t want the same things to happen again we have to understand them and we can’t understand them in the context of Vincent Bugliosi’s little horror story. He did more to victimize Sharon Tate than Charlie Manson ever did.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

It’s the same regurgitated Helter Skelter nonsense. That is so far away from the truth. I don’t care, I won’t say that, I will never, to get a parole, say that what Bugliosi said was true. Never…I’d rather die in prison than get out on a lie.

Part of it was the times and the desperation that had set in, in 1969. The events got out of hand. A lot of his attitudes and beliefs that he had been engendered while he was in prison became expressed. And again, I’m not defending him, he was a sociopath for sure. Not genetic, but something that had been developed - you know his compassion and empathy had been beaten out of him by the system that he grew up, in which was the juvenile justice and criminal justice system. 

NARRATOR

Manson’s told many people many stories about his childhood but certain aspects of his upbringing are irrefutable. His birth certificate from nineteen thirty-four identifies his mother as Kathleen Maddox. A fifteen-year-old single mother who struggled with alcoholism and was often arrested. 

CHARLES MANSON

My mother and my uncle did time. She was a throw away. 

NARRATOR

Sometime around nineteen forty-four, When Kathleen couldn’t care for her son or when she was arrested, Manson began what would become a lifetime in prison. Michael Channels has known Manson personally for twenty-five years and has quite possibly spent more time face-to-face with him than anyone else. 

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Supporter)

If there is a “Charlie Manson”, Charlie Manson was probably created the first time he went into those boys homes. That kid went through some hell in there, and some of the things that he told me. He would never admit to being raped by men or anything like that. That’s just one thing he just don’t do, he don’t.

CHARLES MANSON

In Boys Town, you’re a juvenile. You go in when you’re ten years old and you play ping pong and if someone beats you, you gotta give the table up to them unless you want to fight ‘em. 

CHARLES MANSON

Everything is about fight. If you don’t fight they’ll fuck you in the ass.

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Supporter)

He’ll tell you about being taken down in the basement and put on the table and they make him get naked and then beat him with a strap. That’ll turn you into something that your starting to think ok…

CHARLES MANSON

They’ll take everything you got. And you’re raised up like that. So, you learn how to box and you learn how to fight. And then some guy gets a dagger or a knife or an ice pick and it’s a different kind of fight. You graduate and you grow up.

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Supporter)

That puts you in a whole different mindset. It’s about life or death where’s he’s at.

CHARLES MANSON

I’d only been outside a couple years when I caught this case here. You figure that if you get locked up in reform school when your nine years old and you don’t get out until your twenty, in your brain you’re still nine years old on the outside. Can you see that?

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Supporter)

He don’t trust nobody. He doesn’t even trust me. As long as I’ve known him as a pen pal, visited him in jail, talked to him all the telephone for some twenty-five years now. He doesn’t trust me as far he can spit.

CHARLES MANSON

Anybody that helps me is helping themselves, and I don’t get much help because their ‘aint nobody there. You see it. So, it’s like, everybody that’s using me, they’re not helping me, they’re just riding on me. 

NARRATOR

Police records reflect that by the time Charles Manson was twenty-four years-old, he’d been arrested more than thirty times. Among his numerous offenses he’d been caught driving stolen cars across state lines, broken his probation, escaped from a federal prison, was convicted of check forgery, mail theft and even pimping.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

The first time I visited him and he walked out of the back, prison was just radiating off of him. He’s from prison. He’s not from your world and my normal world out here.

NARRATOR

Those like George Stimson who’ve spent time visiting Charles Manson in person insist that his view of the world is defined by his life in prison.

CHARLES MANSON

Prison is a mind. The mind is prison. That’s why they haven’t been able to break me because there’s no such thing. They’re in a fantasy. They don’t have a reality. Had I not done 22 years in prison before I got arrested this time, I would not have survived. The only reason I survived is, I’ve been through everything in prison ever since I was nine years old.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

It’s hard to understand. I mean, unless you really kind of have an understating of how things operate in prison and how selfish people tend to think when they’re in that environment.

NARRATOR

Leading up to the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, Charles Manson was in Los Angeles serving time for check forgery in a federal prison called Terminal Island

BLACK.

BOARD – TERMINAL ISLAND PRISON

NARRATOR

Two years before the murder spree Phil Kaufman was arrested trying to smuggle Marijuana into the U.S. from Mexico. He ended up in prison alongside Charles Manson.

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with Manson Family)

I got arrested in Tucson, Arizona. I got to terminal Island. I had just gone through the A&O, admission and orientation, before I was allowed out in the yard. There’s this guy with a guitar. Being in prison you gotta be careful who you associate with, and Charlie was a good guy to hang out with because he did give a fuck and he played music.

NARRATOR

Phil Kaufman knew Manson on the inside before anyone ever associated the name “Charles Manson” with the devil incarnate. Kaufman recalls the man he called “Charlie” as a laid-back inmate fully comfortable in prison life, to the point that he was completely unwilling to reform.

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with Manson Family)

If you get five years in a federal penitentiary and they don’t give you any incentive, you’ll just do five years and your uncontrollable. But when you’re sentenced they give you good time so a five-year sentence may be only forty months… But Charlie didn’t do that, he did all the time. He didn’t program. You know he got five years, Charlie did five years.

NARRATOR

According to prison records Charles Manson has received countless reprimands. He once described a prison confrontation in the sixties when a common punishment was for the guards to have the inmates ‘give in’ by putting their “nose to the wall”.

CHARLES MANSON

We fought for 48 days and 48 nights trying to make me put my nose on the wall. I told him “I ain’t putting my goddamn nose on that wall, fuck you”. And they’d come in and rush me and throw me up against the wall, like it or not. Then I’d slide down the wall. Next day they’d come, say, “Get up against the wall”. I’d say “No way”. Here we go again. Yeah, they can beat me but that can’t eat me.

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with Manson Family)

He was playing his guitar and so a guard comes up to him and said “Manson, you ‘aint never gonna get outta here”, and Charlie just kept playing his guitar and said “outta where man”, and just kept going.

CHARLES MANSON

I was a federal prisoner, DEAD, I got out of Terminal Island. Can you understand that? You know it’s like, I had played that game and won every pocket.

NARRATOR

Manson’s release paperwork from Terminal Island is dated March twenty first, nineteen sixty-seven. Vietnam was at the forefront of the American consciousness and a large segment of the male population was either at school or war. Many of the women left behind were embracing what would become known as the summer of love.   

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with Manson Family)

There was a lot of runaways at the time and a lot of people disenchanted with the status quo and they were easy marks, especially up in San Francisco.

The acid you know the pot and everything, they we’re looking for love and Charlie was selling it whole sale.

NARRATOR

This is when it’s been reported that Charles Manson formed a cult called The Manson Family. How did he transition from a chronic petty criminal to a psychotic villain capable of mind control? Until this point in his life, he’d never been charged with a violent crime and no one had ever described him as a guru or spiritual leader so something had to change in the summer of nineteen sixty-seven.

BLACK.

BOARD - THE MANSON FAMILY 

CHARLES MANSON

You see in they call it. In prison, they call it a run. When I get out of prison I run until I’m back in prison again.

NARRATOR

According to Manson, right after prison he spent the first year going back and forth between Haight Ashbury in San Francisco and Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles. 

CHARLES MANSON

I went to ‘Frisco and I was talking to this supposedly great holy guy. You dig? And he’s telling me when you can sit and be comfortable and at peace with yourself that you’re just in harmony, you dig? Now check this out. I figured a lot of things out. I figured this out. I figured it would be easier not to understand anything and keep your mind open and never make your mind up about nothing.

NARRATOR

Charles Manson’s mix of sixties culture and prison jargon attracted young women. Communes were abundant in California in nineteen sixty-seven. This is when Manson met the first two members of what would become known as the “Manson Family”; Mary Brunner who later gave birth to his child, and Lynette Fromme better known as “Squeaky”.

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Remember these weren’t ordinary people. And I get upset with the historians that refer to this group as hippies. They weren’t hippies. Hippies were flower children, they believed in “Make love, not war.” The Family referred to themselves as ‘Slippies.’ They said they were going to slip under the awareness of society. They were very violent. It was a religious cult.

NARRATOR

At trial the prosecution stated the family was nothing more than a closely-knit band of vagabond robots who were slavishly obedient to one man and one man only, their master, their leader, their god Charles Manson. One member of the group was Catherine Gillies. She adopted the nickname “Capistrano” or “Cappi” for short after fell in with Manson in the spring of nineteen sixty-eight.

CAPPI

I mean none of that shit was real, ok. We we’re trying to step out of society is what we we’re trying to do. We didn’t have stabbing practice on Saturday and hang Charlie from a cross on Sunday. I mean none of those things are real. We didn’t call ourselves ‘The Manson Family’, okay. That was, that was the press. We called ourselves a family but we meant that because we were brothers and sisters not because we were ‘The Family’ we were ‘A’ family.

NARRATOR

Another member named Sandra Good collaborated on a book with her partner George Stimson in which he talked about life inside the so-called Manson Family.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter’)

A lot of people do that when you’re young and you’re living like a family, but you know, it doesn’t have the connotation that Manson Family does, capital M, capital F.

NARRATOR

This contention appears to be supported by the trial transcripts. In many instances Vincent Bugliosi says clearly that the group called themselves “the family” but no one ever refers to them as “The Manson Family” the label often reported, which according to George Stimson is significant.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter’)

The thought that he was actively recruiting people to set up some kind of organization to carry out his homicidal aims is just ridiculous.

NARRATOR

But the reality is that they did commit homicidal acts, however, according to several individuals who were part of the group, the label THE MANSON FAMILY was only used by the press and not consistent with how they interacted or viewed themselves at that time.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

You know most of them we’re inexperienced with communes prior to joining that one. So, their only experience with communes would have been with Charlie.

AUTOMATED RECORDING

You have sixty seconds remaining.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

They were always free to leave.

CHARLES MANSON

You know it’s weird man, it’s like you see a bunch of people and their coming along in your life and they’re doing what you’ve already done. I noticed this about people when they think I’m a hippie cult leader.

NARRATOR

The group was made up primarily of young women. Contrary to the common picture of Manson being a master manipulator who recruited them and controlled their minds, Bobby Beausoleil related that they came together much differently.  

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

What most people don’t understand is that it wasn’t Charlie’s charisma that attracted more women. It was once he had the two women together, the women attracted the women. Women who like a community of women, and that was the attraction in that group.

NARRATOR

How they came together and viewed themselves genuinely matters because it’s the first part of understanding whether Manson and the others were a hippy commune or a religious cult. The Helter Skelter theory is dependent on Charles Manson being a brainwashing cult leader, but people who were part of the group deny that dynamic. Is there another explanation for their heinous acts other than Manson dictating that they murder on his behalf?

CHARLES MANSON

I never ordered nobody to do anything but other than what the fuck they wanted to do. Do what you want, if you’re with me you’re free like me. I do what I want to do. You do what you want to do. Be careful with this phone call and don’t use it cause any more persecution to my friends, my family. Peace, I gotta go. My phone time’s up.  

BLACK.

BOARD - THE MANSON GIRLS

NARRATOR

The media has characterized the women who participated in the murders as middle-class and virtuous. They’ve been described as girl scouts, or good students, or Sunday school teachers, that Manson transformed into serial killers. Why would young women with good backgrounds leave their homes to live with an ex-convict who just wanted sex and death?  

Leslie Van Houten was nineteen when she met Charles Manson. The following summer she joined two others in the slaughter of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

RICH PFEIFFER

  (Leslie Van Houten’s Lawyer)

The problem people have is how can you go from a homecoming queen to being a Manson follower? Her childhood was really good until her parents got divorced. Back then it was very different than it is now. It was a big social stigma. She ended up with the druggie kids and the less desirables and she ended up doing drugs at that time. She got pregnant. Her parents pretty much pressured her into having an illegal abortion in the home, and they buried the fetus in the back yard, and that’s something she couldn’t get away from. After that the drug use escalated.

PETER CHIARAMONTE

   (Leslie Van Houten’s former  

  Boyfriend).

She was looking for a spiritual leader and she had home already left home and went out on the road. Bobby takes her to meet Charlie. I think it might have bothered him – that she would challenge him, she and Pat were really the only two that would.

NARRATOR

Patricia Krenwinkel, nicknamed Katie, was with Leslie Van Houten the night they killed the LaBiancas. Krenwinkel also participated in the Sharon Tate murders. At parole hearings, she’s described that her sister was a drug addict who died from an overdose at the age of twenty-nine. Before her death she introduced Patricia to drinking, drugs and alcohol. When Krenwinkel met Manson, she was nineteen. She’d left home to live with her heroin addicted sister in Venice, California.

One of the most infamous murders was Susan Atkins who took the nickname Sadie. She brutally murdered Sharon Tate and used her blood to write PIG on a door. 

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Susan Atkins had a terrible childhood she was abandoned by her parents, she was molested. 

NARRATOR

When Susan Atkins was fifteen her mother died from cancer, sending her home life into a spiral. When Atkins met Charles Manson she’d already worked as a topless dancer, been arrested for car theft, stolen property, and was a heavy drug user.

SUSAN ATKINS

I used to think you came down off an acid trip after 12 hours. Every time you drop acid you get a little bit further away from reality.

CHARLES MANSON

Susan’s pretty, she’s me actually. You see me is all there is, there’s nobody but you.

SUSAN ATKINS

I took so much acid that I was what I would term spaced, and it took me many years to, what I would term now, re-enter, and that was just through not having any acid and having to deal with reality every day.  

NARRATOR

If these were not perfect young women, plucked from society and corrupted solely by Charles Manson, did he actually brainwash them or were they working alongside him in a common motive? What was life like inside the so-called family the year leading up to the murders?

BLACK.

BOARD - THE SUMMER OF ’68  

NARRATOR

When you ask Charles Manson about life in the group before the murders, he talks about sex.

CHARLES MANSON

Everybody walked around naked. We’d all get together and just have a big bang man.

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with “Manson Family”)

I lived with them for almost a month. He’d say you know everybody has to make love. Love. It’s love, spread the love, you know. It was like sex on demand.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter’)

When you’re inside you have nothing, and all of a sudden he’s out and, you know, he said it was a prisoner’s dream come true.

NARRATOR

Another member of the group was Barbara Hoyt who like many of the others was seventeen when she ran away from home after an argument with her father. 

BARBRA HOYT

I met Squeaky. Sandy was pregnant. Sadie, we talked about the hypocrisies of life.

CHARLES MANSON

Nobody’s been able to get women together with each other. They’re jealous creatures, it’s hard to get two women together. And here comes along a nobody from prison who ‘aint even been out of prison long enough to spell his name right. He’s got thirty-five women up and doing whatever, you dig? 

NARRATOR

If Manson had found the dream life of an ex-convict, why would he indoctrinate them to murder people?

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative reporter)  

These murders did not happen because there was not going to be an apocalyptic race war, that’s not why this happened, the victims weren’t chosen at random.

NARRATOR

Brian Davis has spent more than a decade speaking to anyone involved in the events surrounding the murders on his online radio show. From his viewpoint, the key to understanding what happened is Charles “TEX” Watson because he was the person that actually led the murder parties on both nights, and killed more than anyone else.

CHARLES MANSON

Tex was perfect. A solider, a solider who’s in service is righteous and real. There’s no in between.  

NARRATOR

At trial the Vincent Bugliosi said Manson had “total and complete domination over his family including the actual killer Tex Watson”. How did Tex Watson come to be with Manson and perhaps fall under his control?  Brian Davis recounts that in nineteen sixty-seven, Watson left Northern Texas to live with a friend in Los Angeles, finding a part-time job at a Hollywood wig shop. 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

I talked with the guy that worked with Tex. He said Tex was an all-American boy. After about a year, Tex started to hang out at parties and smoke marijuana, grew his hair out a little bit and at that point he said Tex started to turn. So, all this was going on leading up before Tex ever met Charlie.

NARRATOR

Tex Watson met Charles Manson when he was invited to a never-ending party that was being held at a Pacific Palisades mansion. The house was owned by the drummer of the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson.

 BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

Charlie crosses over into that because of the girls, Pat and Ella Joe Bailey we’re out hitchhiking and Dennis Wilson picked them up.

NARRATOR

The Beach Boys fifteenth studio album Twenty-Twenty, features a song co-written by Charles Manson called “Never Learn Not to Love”. During that time Manson befriended a record producer through Dennis Wilson named Terry Melcher.

Leslie Van Houten interviewed by LAPD, November 26th, 1969

LAPD: Tell me about Terry Melcher. Remember him?

LESLIE VAN HOUTEN: Terry Marshmallow?

LAPD: Mel- Melcher. Terry Melcher.

LESLIE VAN HOUTEN: I call him Terry Marshmallow.

LAPD: Oh, is that what you call him.

LESLIE VAN HOUTEN: I don’t know really. I knew that he said he could get us recorded and that he had known one of the Beach Boys.

NARRATOR

When he met Charles Manson, Terry Melcher lived on Cielo Drive in the same house that was later rented to film director Roman Polanski and his movie star wife Sharon Tate, after Melcher moved out. This is a direct connection between Manson and the Sharon Tate murders. Prosecutors claimed that Manson was an ambitious musician who aspired to be like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, so Dennis Wilson introduced him to Terry Melcher, but Melcher rejected him.  When Manson decided to begin a race war by killing random white people, he chose Terry Melchers house. According to the prosecution the residence was symbolic to Charles Manson and particularly the establishment’s rejection of him. Phil Kaufman worked in the music industry and recorded Charles Manson shortly before the murders took place. This is an audio recording from nineteen seventy made as part of the investigation.

Phil Kaufman interviewed by Aaron Stovitz, January 27th, 1970.

Up to this point he had recorded at various studios, and being as transient as he was, he never stayed around long enough, you know, to consummate a record deal. So, every time he recorded no one could ever release his music because he never signed any contracts. 

PHIL KAUFMAN

  (Lived with “Manson Family”)

‘Cause he had a good thing going for him, you know. Money wasn’t even involved in anything. He didn’t have to earn a living, he had girls going out and getting him food, he was having sex, playing his music you know. Life was good for him.

CHARLES MANSON

I could have been a rock and roll star. I could have been a movie star. That’s a slowdown. I don’t want a fuckin’ job. I’d rather have a vine of wine on the beach and be free as a dog looking for a place to sleep under the bridge rather than go to work. I was trying to get away from civilization.

NARRATOR

If Manson wasn’t rejected by the music industry, and Melcher’s house didn’t represent the establishment to him, then what was the real reason for Tex Watson taking three women over to Terry Melcher’s house and killing five people?

We put this question to Charles Manson directly.

CHARLES MANSON

Tex wasn’t wrong, you understand what I’m saying? Tex had to do what he had to do, and he said that. He didn’t say I told him to do a damn thing. They said the girls said it but the girls didn’t say it. She said, “Charlie told me to go do what Tex said.” You know why the District Attorney put the race war on me?

AUTOMATED RECORDING

You have thirty seconds remaining.

CHARLES MANSON

You got the whole damn fuckin planet against me.

NARRATOR

Charles Manson’s answers are not always straightforward, and he denies involvement in the Sharon Tate murders, but the missing factor may be the song Charles Manson contributed to the Beach Boys.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Charlie was told that he would be compensated for the use of the song, and the amount he was told was $5000. Now he didn’t care so much about the money. If you’re in prison and you owe somebody and you give your word and you don’t keep your word, that’s a justification for, you know, being killed. So, he sent Tex to kill Terry. Not a house full of five people. See that’s what’s so critical here. He wasn’t picking a house full of innocent people, he was picking Terry Melcher. The people that were there are the ones that took the brunt of what Tex Watson brought there that night.

NARRATOR

Charles Manson seeking retaliation on Terry Melcher for breaking his word, contradicts the motive laid out by the prosecution because it changes Manson’s intent from starting a race war to vengeance. According to the Helter Skelter Theory, Charles Manson planned to inspire a race war by killing affluent whites, so he sent his follower to Terry Melcher’s house. During the war, Manson would hide with his followers in a secret cave located in Death Valley. Afterwards, they would emerge and Manson would lead the victorious black army.   

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

When members joined the Family, he was telling them how Adolph Hitler was his hero for what Hitler did to Jews in World War II. He was a follower of Nietzsche. You know, just sick stuff.

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Acquaintance)

They say Manson wants to have a race war. He wants the black people – they’re going to rise up and kill all the white people. For a supposed person that hates black people why would he now want to be in charge. The story kind of loses me all over the place.

NARRATOR

Some have proposed that the prosecution made-up the Helter Skelter theory in order to more easily convict Charles Manson through a sensational conspiracy narrative. Another theory exists which some believe can explain the murders without the race war motive.      

Brian Davis

I’m not supporting Charlie Manson at all. I’m supporting more of the truth.

NARRATOR

If the prosecution did construct the Helter Skelter Theory, is convicting a man like Charles Manson so essential that any means of achieving it is acceptable?   

Brian Davis

It’s not about proving Charlie innocent. Even if it’s Charlie Manson. The law has to work for everybody.

CHARLES MANSON

This thing is so vast. I don’t know whether you can accept it. 

BLACK.

BOARD – AN ALTERNATE THEORY   

NARRATOR

Another theory proposes that the murders were the culmination of events centered around Charles Manson. Charles Manson had been released from prison and had formed a commune of lost souls. Several months before the murders the group had moved to a farmstead built as a backdrop for western movies and television shows, called Spahn Ranch.

CHARLES MANSON

I never realized it but the reason the ranch was so cool was that nobody ever lied to each other, man. We all got a long with each other, man. Everybody was straight up, there was no bullshit. We had a pretty nice group of people there. 

GRAY WOLF

  (MANSON SUPPORTER)

When I went to the ranch, I felt it was just the most mellow place I’d ever been. There was no ambitions. It’s a lot different than what the media might portray. 

NARRATOR

The ranch was owned by an eighty-year-old blind man named George Spahn, who lived in the main house which was located here. The ranch burned down in nineteen seventy-one but at the time extended along the Santa Susana Pass, isolated by the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley.  

CHARLES MANSON

Everybody at the ranch was one. There was only one moving thing on that ranch, that was George Spahn, the old blind man. George was the boss. You know it’s like the horses ruled the ranch. We all served whatever was capable of service. A slave understands it’s master much more than the master understands the slave. 

BARBRA HOYT

Charlie told Squeaky to take care of George so they could stay at the ranch, and she did. 

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

She didn’t like having sex with other men. That’s why she got into that for Charlie. She took care of George and that became her thing. She wanted to only have sex with Charlie, and so she put herself in that position where she wouldn’t have to have sex with anyone else. She was a caretaker. 

BARBRA HOYT

She loved him. I think he wanted George to will the ranch to Squeaky. 

NARRATOR

Records reflect that while living at Spahn Ranch Tex Watson was arrested on a drug charge in April of nineteen sixty-nine, three months before the murders. 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

It was business for Tex, you know, he partook and he sold. That’s how he made a lot of his money. You go back before the murders, Tex has got the history for dealing drugs, and making drug deals, you know. That’s what Tex does.

CHARLES MANSON

I said don’t lie on this ranch. Other than that you can do anything you want here. Just don’t hurt nobody. 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

This is the connection. This is where it all connects.  

Tex Watson had a dope dealer. Tex Watson describes the drug dealer in his book as a mafia connected guy who owned a vending machine company that he used as a front for his dope business. 

CHARLES MANSON

Episodes like that happen every day in the drug world. 

NARRATOR

On July first, Tex Watson spoke with his vending machine dope dealer who was looking to sell twenty-five kilos of marijuana for two thousand five hundred dollars. Watson didn’t have that kind of money so he called his girlfriend in the city. She introduced him to another drug dealer named Bernard Crowe who was thought to be associated with The Black Panthers political movement. It was then that Watson came up with a scam. He would buy twenty-five kilos from his vending machine dealer for two thousand five hundred dollars, then sell twenty-two kilos to Crowe at a mark-up for two thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. That way Watson could buy the drugs from the vending machine dealer, and deliver what he promised to Bernard Crowe, all the while keeping the difference in money and drugs for himself and his girlfriend. To make that work neither of the drug dealers could meet, so Tex Watson planned to have Bernard Crowe pay upfront.

CHARLES MANSON

As the convicts say, if you do all the talking you got to be all the right. Lying’s what gets everything fucked up.

NARRATOR

When the time came, Crowe wouldn’t hand over his money to a hippie he didn’t know, so he kept Tex Watson’s girlfriend as collateral while Watson went to pick up the drugs. When this complication arose, Watson burned them both.  

CHARLES MANSON

He just promised to deal some drugs for them, and took the money and ran. 

CAPPI

What happened was Tex made a deal with him evidently, and then fuckin’ bummed out on the deal. We didn’t get anything out of it, it had nothing to do with us. It was all about Tex, trust me.

NARRATOR  

After that an enraged Bernard Crowe set out to find the man he knew as Charlie Watson. 

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

When Crowe called the ranch, and asked for Charlie, meaning Charles Watson, TJ got Charlie Manson on the phone because he knew Watson as TEX. And when Crowe said I want my money and I’m coming up to the ranch to burn the place down and rape all the girls there Charlie said no you’re not. I’ll come down and talk to you about it.

 CHARLES MANSON

To deal drugs you gotta be real. That’s underworld. Underworld means anybody can take that away from you and there’s nothing the laws going to do about it. Before the cops catch drug dealers, drug dealers catch drug dealers.

CAPPI

He was worried about us getting killed. We had babies there and all kinds of stuff, and all these young people, okay and they we’re trying to kill us. And that’s why Charlie went to Bernard, to stop him before he killed somebody.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

Bernard Crowe had Tex Watson’s girlfriend tied up, and I guess words were exchanged. And Charlie pulled out then gun a shot him.

CHARLES MANSON

Yeah, yeah I shot the Crowe. She said that Bernard was going to kill her. So we went down to help her, and ended up shooting him to help her. 

CAPPI

Bernard Crowe didn’t give him a chance. He had to shoot him or he was going to get shot, and Bernard Crowe just said “You better shoot me now, do it,” you know, and Charlie shot him.

NARRATOR

Bernard Crowe survived this shooting, although as Manson has often detailed, he was unaware of this.

CHARLES MANSON

That’s the difference between the underworld and being righteous with the underworld. In other words you don’t get caught off base or you get tagged out. It’s a simple game.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

He saw all the people he was with as children. They were weak they wouldn’t know how to hold their mud. Rather than try to convince them that they should, he just manipulated them to try to make them so complicit in violent crimes that they would not snitch on him. 

NARRATOR

In the alternate theory, Charles Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe left him with two problems. First, he had to be sure no one in the commune would talk to the police. Accordingly, he encouraged them to commit violent crimes for the group just like he had done.

CHARLES MANSON

I play cards. My family’s cards. My family are righteous; They can’t get away. They’re dead. Everyone in my family is dead like me. 

NARRATOR

Manson’s second problem was that he believed the Black Panthers would retaliate for the shooting, something he told members of the group.

 BARBRA HOYT

He was very worried about the black panthers attacking the ranch. It went from happy go lucky fun. It got so intense, so fearful. It makes me nervous just to talk about it.

CHARLES MANSON

We were in trouble with everybody that was against us. Anybody that didn’t like us, we didn’t like them. We we’re fighting all the time man.  

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Charlie, when he had that situation with Crowe and I went out there to hang out, I didn’t know what I had happened. And he told me, he pulled me aside and he said, “Man, you know I don’t have enough guys here, you know. I’m expecting a retaliation from the Black Panthers and I need more guys here”. So, you know, I was a young kid and that sort of appealed to my ego. 

CHARLES MANSON

Everybody likes everybody else dead. Nobody likes anybody.

BARBRA HOYT

I heard Charlie was recruiting the Straight Satan’s to be guards. 

NARRATOR

To protect the commune and himself from the Black Panthers, Manson enlisted a motorcycle club called the Straight Satans. In this audio recording with the L-A-P-D, the Straight Satans former president, Al Springer, described their arrangement.

AL SPRINGER interview with LAPD 11/69

Charlie says, “Now wait a minute”, he says uh, “maybe I can give you a better thing then you got over there.” I goes “What’s that?” He says, “Move up here. You can have all the girls you want, and all the girls”, he says, “are all yours.” 

NARRATOR

Three days after the Bernard Crowe shooting, Linda Kasabian arrived at Spahn Ranch for the first time. 

BARBRA HOYT

Linda was, she was a nice girl who was looking for, I don’t know if she was looking for Jesus or, um, she was just looking for life, and what was real and what wasn’t. 

CHARLES MANSON

You don’t find too many women who will stand up in any kind of fight. 

NARRATOR

Linda Kasabian’s account is critical because she was one of the four directly involved in the Sharon Tate murders. When she was later arrested, Kasabian gave her first statement to her lawyer Gary Fleischman. 

GARY FLEISCHMAN

I heard her version of it the first night they brought her back.

None of it made any sense that’s the problem. It was nonsensical and that’s where Vince came up with the Helter Skelter theory. But I never heard that theory during the period I was representing her, she didn’t know anything about it. 

NARRATOR

Days after the Bernard Crowe shooting Bobby Beausoleil committed the first murder. The prosecution said that Manson “needed money” but the specifics of this motive were never fully explained. The motive was described as generally related Manson’s preparation for the race war.

 STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Manson wanted money. He wanted money because he was preparing for the revolution.

NARRATOR

The prosecution contended that Manson sent Bobby Beausoleil, and two women, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins, to the home of an acquaintance named Gary Hinman. Their orders were supposedly to retrieve money from Hinman and kill him if he refused. 

CHARLES MANSON

It’s all crap. You don’t have to look it up, you just have to look at it.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Nobody sent me over to recruit Gary to the family. He was as much of the so-called family as I was and I wasn’t a part of the family.

NARRATOR

Bobby Beausoleil contends that in the aftermath of Bernard Crowe shooting, Manson’s arrangement with the biker gang made them a constant presence at the ranch. Two weeks before the Sharon Tate murders, Beausoleil says the Straight Satans were looking for drugs. Beausoleil sold them mescaline he got from his former roommate Gary Hinman. Beausoleil maintains that the day after the drug deal the Straight Satans demanded their money back claiming the drugs were bad.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

I don’t really believe you I think they were trying to get the drugs for free. They were playing me for a sucker. There wasn’t any bad drugs or anything like that.

CHARLES MANSON

Beausoleil was a strong individual. Yeah, he was in trouble with the motorcycle gang. And, we were dealing and wheeling underworld man. That’s what motorcycle gangs do, you know. In other words, the strongest survive. 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

There is a property report of Gary Hinman. And in that property, report they list homemade scales with white powder. They didn’t test it for it mescaline, so we don’t know if it was or not. To me that’s evidence.

NARRATOR

With the Straight Satans threat looming, Bobby Beausoleil claims he went to Gary Hinman’s house to retrieve the money from the drug deal and return it to the biker gang.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

I went there for one thing and that was to collect the money. And ‘cause they asked to come along, Mary had a relationship with Gary, and I don’t know why Susan Atkins asked to come along. I didn’t see any problem going there. I figure it was going to be no problem to get the money back and, you know, and come back and give it to ‘em, and it was going to be done.

NARRATOR

As recalled by Bobby Beausoleil, when Gary Hinman refused to return the money the confrontation escalated. Along with Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins, Beausoleil stayed at the house for two days. Beausoleil thought he could reason with Hinman to give up the money. They wrestled over a gun which went off but hit no one. During the confrontation, someone called the Ranch to ask for help. At some point, Bobby Beausoleil gained the upper hand and made Gary Hinman sign over his cars.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

So he had these two old wrecks and they were, I figured between the two of them they were worth maybe a grand. The grand that they were saying I owed them. 

NARRATOR

With the pink slips in hand they prepared to leave. As they were walking out the door Manson unexpectedly rushed in with a sword and cut Gary Hinman across the face.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Charlie had slashed his face and left me with the problem. And I didn’t know how to get out of it, you know, I didn’t know how to get away without getting arrested, unless I killed him.

NARRATOR

After the murder, someone wrote on the walls in Gary Hinman’s blood.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

To be honest with you, I don’t remember a lot that happened immediately after my having killed Gary. That really devastated me. My memories of what happened afterwards have never really been clear.

NARRATOR

A black panther paw print was drawn on the wall along with the words POLITICAL PIGGY.  

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

It was in everyone’s minds. Everyone believed Charlie had killed a black panther, according to what he had told everyone. There was an intent to throw the investigators of the trail.

NARRATOR

From this perspective, Gary Hinman’s murder was directly related to the Bernard Crowe shooting. They staged the crime scene to frame the Black Panthers because they feared retaliation. At the same time, Manson’s intent to make the others complicit had been unexpectedly furthered. This prevented members of the group from telling the police about what Manson had done. According to police records on Wednesday, August sixth, two days before the Sharon Tate murders, Bobby Beausoleil was arrested in one of Gary Hinman’s cars. 

CHARLES MANSON

I was in San Diego when that happened.

BARBRA HOYT

I heard he got arrested for murder. I thought that the police had just made it up. No, I didn’t believe it.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

I think it’s important to look at the timing of this. You’re looking at these murders that happened on Cielo and Waverly are like two days later, and it’s very important that they happened then rather than a month later or two weeks earlier. So, that indicates that they we’re a reaction to Bobby’s arrest and the idea of getting him out of prison by committing copycat murders. 

  NARRATOR

In the alternate theory, two days after Bobby Beausoleil was arrested the group planned to commit another murder. This turned out to be the murders of Sharon Tate and those who were at her home on August eighth. The group planned to stage the crime scene to make it appear as if Gary Hinman’s killer was still on the loose. They reasoned this would compel the police to let Bobby Beausoleil go. Charles Manson admitted that this was their thinking.

CHARLES MANSON

He was in prison. He was in the LA county jail when it happened. See we we’re all in a brotherhood. We were all in one family and we were helping the brother. It happened to be Beausoleil. 

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

He told other people he was trying to send a message to me, and others make the police think that they had the wrong person.  

NARRATOR

According to Bobby Beausoleil this is not the entire picture but reaffirms Manson’s deeper motive. Committing a copycat murder to free Beausoleil would make the others complicit, preventing more members of the group from potentially talking to the police about the Bernard Crowe shooting.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Depending on the orientation of whoever he was talking to he would say things that would support some sort of agenda that he had.

NARRATOR

Manson’s agenda comes full circle when you consider that he still harbored a grudge against Terry Melcher for the song Manson had contributed to the Beach Boys. According to the alternate theory, this is why four members of the commune ventured out to Terry Melcher’s house, two days after Bobby Beausoleil’s arrest, on August eighth, nineteen sixty-nine.

BLACK.

BOARD - LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 8TH, 1969, NIGHT OF THE SHARON TATE MURDERS 

BARBRA HOYT

I remember after dinner in the backhouse, and I remember Charlie and Tex talking in the corner, and it was like there was black around them. It was just like evil around them, a black cloud around them.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

There were people at the ranch who owed Charlie favors, and he said you owe me, I’m collecting. Do something to get Bobby outta jail, I don’t care what you do but do it.

CHARLES MANSON

I gave my life to what I thought was a brother. Every time I do that man I always end up on the short end of everything because I’m, I’m stupid. I can’t do school books stuff. I’m a stupid hillbilly is what it boils down to.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

I know he told Tex Watson, “You either take care of the problem or get on the road.” Tex Watson could have just left the ranch and there wouldn’t have been any “Tate-Labianca” murders.

CHARLES MANSON

Tex didn’t say that I told him to tell him anything. I told him four or five different ways.

MICHAEL CHANNELS

  (Manson Acquaintance)

He don’t tell nobody to do nothing. He don’t tell you to do anything today. He can convince you that that’s your idea, because usually it is your idea.

CHARLES MANSON

You can do what you want to do when you make up your mind and you decide that that’s what you’re going to do.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

What they didn’t volunteer to do was something they didn’t understand which was his need to protect himself. He manipulated them.

SUSAN ATKINS  

I remember when we first went in, one of the people said ‘who are you’ and Tex said, ‘I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business”. I don’t think Charles Manson’s mind was in control of Tex’s mind that night. Charlie’s human too, and his mental powers are just as limited, maybe not as limited as other humans, but there was an evil force in control of Tex that night.

BARBRA HOYT

They died so horribly, I don’t know if people really think about how. You just how much they suffered. You know, I think about Sharon Tate and she must have been insane with fear by the time they got to her.

PHIL KAUFMAN

What does it take to have somebody tell you to go and kill people, for what reason? I couldn’t conceive what could allow them to be influenced to go down… They didn’t kill people they butchered people, and these are the people that I’d been sleeping with.

NARRATOR

When Susan Atkins used Sharon Tate’s blood to write on a door, it appeared to call back to the murder of Gary Hinman. The police never made this connection. 

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Sherriff’s homicide was handling the Hinman murders and two of the homicide investigators went to the Tate investigators and said look we have this murder of Gary Hinman, blood on the wall, in Hinman’s blood. So they said, look we think these are connected, the LAPD investigators sent them away said, nah, they’re not connected.

 NARRATOR

The prosecution maintained that the events of that summer were not connected. They claimed that Charles Manson led a religious cult and was trying to start a race war called Helter Skelter, inspired by the Beatles.

DIRECTOR (OS)

If they’re trying to frame black people, why aren’t they writing “kill white people” or something very obvious?

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Probably because they didn’t think of it. That of course, you know, people would connect blacks because of the Beatles white album, so some black would figure it out and tell somebody, oh ya know (cough), Beatles, this is part of the murders--

DIRECTOR (OS)  

It just seems like a lot of dots to connect.

 BLACK.

BOARD - LOS ANGELES, SATURDAY - AUGUST 9TH, 1969, NIGHT OF THE LABIANCA MURDERS

NARRATOR

If members of the group killed Sharon Tate and others as a copycat murder in order to free Bobby Beausoleil, then why did  they commit more murders the next night?

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

The second night at the LaBianca’s was to cover up for what he had done the first night, which was kill a house full of people. He didn’t realize it was gonna be this big thing that had unfolded up there at the house on Cielo. He didn’t know that Terry Melcher had rented the place out so it basically turned into a fiasco.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

It was the weekend so, he’s going out the next night because he’s gotta cover up those Tate murders, because that’s going to get out and that’s going to be nasty.

DIRECTOR (VO)

Who did kill those people? 

CHARLES MANSON

The people that told you they killed ‘em. They said on the witness stand, yeah I killed ‘em.

NARRATOR

On the second night, another member of the group became complicit; Nineteen-year-old Leslie Van Houten.

PETER CHIARAMONTE

  (Leslie Van Houten’s former  

  Boyfriend).

Tex was Leslie’s boyfriend, ok, at the time. When Pat is explaining, what happened to Leslie, as I understand it, Pat was shaken by what she’d done but Leslie felt that she had to prove herself now, we’re gonna go out again and this has to be done. She must have been told at that point the line, “We’re doing it for Bobby.”  

NARRATOR

Catherine Gilles, also known as Cappi, recalls seeing Leslie Van Houten get into a car with Patricia Krenwinkel and others.

CAPPI

I had no idea where they were going but Katie and Lulu were the closest people in the universe to me. That girl was my other me and Katie was like our big sister. And they were in the car, and they we’re going somewhere without me, you know, and so I tried to get in the car and they wouldn’t let me. I didn’t know why. They were protecting me.

NARRATOR

Manson often speaks in riddles. This ensured many members of the group were not aware of what was going on.

CHARLES MANSON

What’s real has different levels. You could go on certain levels of reality, that other people don’t really understand at all. And they call it insanity.

NARRATOR

The group drove to Los Feliz and parked near an intersection on Waverly Drive. Inside the home to the west was an affluent couple who owned a chain of grocery stores, named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

PHIL KAUFMAN

It was a place that they knew. They had been to Harold’s house which is right next door.

NARRATOR

This audio recording from the LA District Attorney shows that the house next door to LaBianca residence was once occupied by a man named Harold True, who knew Manson and the girls.

Harold True interviewed by Aaron Stovitz, January 27th, 1970:

They called and asked if they could spend the night in the house. And we let them stay the night. At Waverly? Yeah it was a big house, a lot of people stayed there. “Now how did he get your… have your phone number to call?” I don’t know. I guess maybe I gave him a map.

PHIL KAUFMAN

When I skipped the country and the time of my marijuana bust, Harold True gave me his passport. He had never had a passport so I got a passport in Harold’s name. And then when I got out and I went to see Charlie, I took Harold along. Harold was a big old lumpy guy and you know he thought he might get laid.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

They were camping out with the bus there and living at Harold True’s place, and the neighbours called the cops.  They had to leave there because the neighbours called the cops. And the neighbours were the LaBiancas.

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

Charlie picked people he had grudges against. He didn’t just pick people at random.

NARRATOR

This adds to the alternate theory that on the second night Manson continued manipulating the others.  It wasn’t because he would rule the world after a race war, instead it was a series of interconnected events. It began with the Bernard Crowe shooting, which led to the Gary Hinman murder and Bobby Beausoliel’s arrest. This culminated in the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders. A significant amount of the commune became complicit and Manson’s outstanding grudges were satisfied. There is one additional piece that appears to support this theory, Charles Manson’s actions after the LaBianca murders. According to Tex Watson’s account, summarized from numerous public statements, he and Charles Manson went up to the LaBianca house and broke in through the back door. Manson woke up Leno LaBianca and tied him up. They retrieved Rosemary LaBianca from her bedroom and tied her up, before threatening to kill the couple in the living room. Manson disputes Tex Watson’s version of events.

CHARLES MANSON

What has he told you about me? Everything that’s going to help him, right? You are for you. I am for me. I’m for Charlie. I didn’t kill nobody.

NARRATOR

It’s undisputed that Manson drove to the LaBianca house and that he went into the house for some period of time. According to the trial transcripts, Linda Kasabian is asked; Question, how long after he left the car did he return to the car? Answer, I remember we all lit up cigarettes and we smoked about three-quarters of a Pall Mall cigarette, however long that takes.

The question is, what did Charles Manson do once he left the car?  

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

If you’re looking at three quarters of a cigarette, it’s five minutes. When you’re looking at what Tex says, there’s just not enough time.

NARRATOR

Manson and Tex Watson went up to the house. After a few minutes Manson returned, at which point Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten went into the house. Manson then drove away with the others.

Those in the car claim that while in the house Manson had retrieved Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet which police later found twenty miles away in a gas station bathroom located in Sylmar.  

According to the prosecution Manson conspired to plant the wallet in a black neighbourhood, reasoning a black person would use the credit cards and be connected to the murders. This would help spur the impending race war. But this motive is contradicted by the evidence. Census data from the nineteen seventies shows that Sylmar was not a black neighbourhood.

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Obviously, he got screwed up. The wallet got planted in the wrong city, I mean there’s no point in planting it in a white area and having a white person use the credit cards. That defeats the whole purpose of blaming the murders on the blacks.

NARRATOR

If framing black people wasn’t Manson’s motive, then what was he trying to achieve in the few minutes that he was in the LaBianca house? And, what was the reason for taking Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet? 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

My theory is, Charlie goes up to the house. Tex Watson says in his book when they get in there Mr. LaBianca says “Hey, what do you all want, you all want money? I can get you money.” Let’s say Charlie did accept the money offer. My Theory is Charlie got the money and then he left, that’s why he left.

 NARRATOR

No one disputes that once Manson left, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten stayed in the house and murdered the LaBiancas.  

 STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

With Leno LaBianca there was a carving fork protruding out his abdomen and Krenwinkel had written on his abdomen WAR. They found a knife with the handle sticking out of one end the blade traversing his neck, severing a carotid artery and part of the blade sticking out of the other side.

NARRATOR

During the LaBianca murders, all agree that Charles Manson took the rest of the group to Venice. The prosecution insisted that Manson went to Venice to get his followers to commit another murder. Once again, the motive was to frame a black person and fuel the race war. According to trial testimony, Manson allegedly took his followers to the apartment building located here. 

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

The address to that apartment building is, you could literally say a stone’s throw from the Straight Satans clubhouse in Venice. You mean that Straight Satan biker gang that Charlie owed money to? Yeah that biker gang, they were in Venice. 

NARRATOR

In the alternate theory, after Manson shot Bernard Crowe he feared retaliation and enlisted the Straight Satans for protection. Bobby Beausoleil compromised this protection by getting into a conflict with the Straight Satans over a drug deal.  

If Manson took enough money from the LaBianca residence, he could have gone to Venice to settle the debt that Bobby Beausoleil owed the Straight Satan’s from the Gary Hinman drug deal. This would’ve regained their protection from the Black Panthers.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

It’s what, 4 in the morning, 3 or 4 in the morning? They didn’t go back to ranch, they went to Venice. That’s how pressing this was for Charlie. They could wait until Monday to do business. I think they went to Venice to pay off the Straight Satans.

CHARLES MANSON

When you’re in the know with somebody that’s in the know. You don’t play games with them. 

BRIAN DAVIS

That next morning Charlie sent Linda Kasabian down to the jail with a message for Bobby Beausoleil, don’t say anything, everything’s cool. Why all of a sudden is everything cool? By Monday before any court proceedings started they get a message to Bobby, everything’s cool, we’ve taken care of everything. Don’t say a word about nothing. We’ll have you out of there soon. 

NARRATOR

By Monday morning seven people were dead but the string of murders was not finished.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

The neighboring rancher, he didn’t like the Manson family. So, what was going on then is, they we’re trying to get them off the ranch. 

NARRATOR  

It’s been long speculated that the neighboring rancher may have recruited a ranch hand named Donald “Shorty” Shae to rid Spahn Ranch of the group. Manson believed Shae had tipped off the police leading to a raid.

BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

You know there was definitely no love lost between Shorty Shae and Charles Manson as far as I can gather. 

NARRATOR

On August sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, twenty-six members of the commune were arrested for suspicion of auto theft. Because of a date error, the search warrant was ruled invalid and all were released. The police had no idea that they were connected to the murders making national news. When they returned to Spahn Ranch, Donald Shae was never seen again.

BARBRA HOYT

I went to sleep in a little trailer. I heard a scream, And then I heard more screaming and it just didn’t end and it was horrific. It was horrible, and it kept going on and on and I recognized Shorty’s voice.

NARRATOR

After Donald Shae’s disappearance, Manson and the commune left Spahn Ranch.  

 BRIAN DAVIS

  (Investigative Reporter)  

Cappi suggested that her grandmother had a place out there in Death Valley, when he was looking for a place to go. They went out there and looked at it. He fell in love with it. And he said this is it. This is it, this is our utopia.

NARRATOR

The land in Death Valley was an isolated mining property owned by Catherine Gilles’ grandmother. After the murders, Charles Manson and the group stayed there until October of nineteen sixty-nine.    

CAPPI

We went to the desert because of me. My favorite place besides the ocean. I was born on the ocean and I lived in the desert, and I love the desert so I offered up the desert.

NARRATOR

Just like authorities had in Los Angeles, Inyo County officers raided the Death Valley ranch on August twelfth, nineteen sixty-nine for suspicion of auto theft.

Twenty-four members of the group we’re arrested and once again police had no idea they were involved in any of the murders. The killers were imprisoned except for Patricia Krenwinkel, who went on both nights, and Tex Watson.  

 GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

After the murders, Pat Krenwinkel went back to Alabama, Tex Watson went back to Texas. Nobody was holding them around. 

NARRATOR

Records show that Linda Kasabian was bailed out by her parents and left California. Before anyone else could arrange for bail, Susan Atkins confessed.  

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

Susan Atkins is the one that broke the case. I mean they didn’t know that it was Charles Manson or Susan Atkins or anything until she blabbed.

PHIL KAUFMAN

That was her, that was very much her. Charlie would have been better killing her and he probably would have gotten away with it a little bit longer.

NARRATOR

While inside the country jail, Susan Atkins told her cellmates that she was involved in the murder of Sharon Tate. One of the first people Atkins confessed to was a call girl named Virginia Graham.  

VIRGINIA GRAHAM

Susan Atkins, she plopped herself down and she sat on the bunk and we started talking, and she presumed to tell me how stupid the police were, and they were dumb. She said to me, “You know those murders up benedict canyon?” She said you know who did it don’t you and I said no, and she said cold as can be “you’re looking her”.  She didn’t say Helter Skelter to me. I found out about, Helter Skelter, later on. But I don’t recall her telling me Helter Skelter.

NARRATOR

Susan Atkins was denied compassionate release in two thousand and eight, and died from brain cancer in prison. However, in nineteen sixty-nine the DA was willing to overlook the brutality of her actions.

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

The deal with Susan Atkins, the prosecution was going to let her plead to second degree murder. Sharon was begging for her life. She was being held by Susan Aktins and – she said “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me. I just want to have my baby.”

SUSAN ATKINS

I felt nothing, I felt absolutely nothing for her as she begged for the life of her baby.  

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor) She said “Look bitch, I don’t care about you or your child. You’re going to die and I don’t feel a thing behind it.” Having Susan Atkins as the witness that wouldn’t have gone over to well with the jury.

NARRATOR  

The prosecutor who was working out the deal was the author of HELTER SKELTER, Vincent Bugliosi.

DANIEL SIMONE

Vincent Bugliosi was an outstanding prosecutor. But if one really we’re to dig much deeper, what emerges is he was a womanizer. He loved attention, he was over-ambitious

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

He had a guy sitting in court that I thought was a reporter but it turned out he was Curt Gentry, who Vince had hired to write a book on the case. He didn’t tell me that he was writing a book during the trial. So, yeah, he didn’t tell anybody it. This was gonna make him rich and famous.

CHARLES MANSON

It’s all underworld solider. Who you think the president is? Where you think his office is, in my cell?

NARRATOR

This is the Helter Skelter theory that was presented to the jury in the Charles Manson trials.

NARRATOR

Manson formed a cult of obedient followers who wanted to drop out of society. Their connection to the Bernard Crowe shooting is unknown as the motive and was not explored by the prosecution.  

Manson wanted to be a rock star and was obsessed with the Beatles. He had also met the Beach Boys.

Through the Beach Boys, Manson came to resent Terry Melcher and considered Melcher’s house a representation of the establishment.

Manson believed the Beatles were predicting a race war through hidden messages in their songs, and he needed money to supplement his preparation.

Because of this, Manson further brainwashed his cult to believe in the race war and ordered them to kill Gary Hinman.

Meanwhile, to start the race war, Manson decided to murder white people and frame black people. He indirectly ordered his followers to kill whoever lived at Terry Melcher’s house.

Manson also chose another house at random and ordered its occupants to be killed.

Manson’s plot was to frame black people by having his followers leave indirect references to the Beatles White Album at the crime scenes. Manson believed that both the police and black people would understand these references, and this would lead into the race war.

Once the race war began, Manson and the family would hide in a secret cave in the desert. After the war, Manson would emerge and become the leader of the victorious black army. At that point he would rebuild the world.  

This is the theory that convicted Charles Manson and others, and gained prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi fame, and a best-selling book.  

CHARLES MANSON

That’s what the DA said. Everybody will tell you what they think about me, according to what they want to use me for. All I’m looking for is someone to help me. I’ve always been by myself alone.

Phil Kaufman interviewed by Aaron Stovitz, January 27th, 1970.

Anything on the recordings that you know of whereby he speaks of his philosophy of Helter Skelter, the ruination and damnation of this world? No.

PHIL KAUFMAN

I was really not a friendly witness. I was on parole for one thing, I really didn’t, you know, want to get connected with these people. And this DA comes out to my house and tries to get stuff out of me that wasn’t there.

CHARLES MANSON  

They know how to milk the cow man. And they do it so well the cow don’t even know it.

NARRATOR

The Helter Skelter theory is not only sensational, it establishes the elements of murder and conspiracy under California law. To be found guilty, the defendant must agree to commit a crime as well as commit an overt act in furtherance of that agreement.

GEORGE STIMSON

  (Author – ‘Goodbye Helter    

Skelter)

Without proving the Helter Skelter motive there was no evidence whatsoever that Manson wanted these murders to happen. You have to be a party to it, you can’t just know about it.

 CHARLES MANSON

I didn’t break the law because I’ve been in prison all my life and I know the law. I know what conspiracy is. I’m not going to conspire to do something. That’s kind of stupid isn’t it? I’m not a stupid dude. I’m dumb but I’m not stupid.  

NARRATOR

This is the implication of what Manson is saying. It’s not that he wasn’t involved in the events of the summer of sixty-nine. Manson admits to shooting Bernard Crowe, his involvement with drugs, the Straight Satans, and the motive of getting Bobby out of prison. But when it came to the murders he maintains he purposely kept himself at a distance. 

GARY FLEISCHMAN

I thought it was a horrible case against him. Remember he was not at the scene. He was forty miles away when the murders took place so he was an armchair murderer.

NARRATOR

The Helter Skelter theory was how the prosecution demonstrated that Manson was guilty of conspiracy and murder under the requirements of the law. They described a scenario where he ordered the murders without actually saying the words.

STEPHEN KAY

  (Manson Family Co-Prosecutor)

I mean they all knew about Helter Skelter but we didn’t have any evidence from that specific night that Manson said go out and start Helter Skelter. He just said “Go with Tex and do what Tex tells you to do”. 

CHARLES MANSON

They still won’t admit the truth. They had no evidence against me, none. 

NARRATOR

There was no evidence that Manson himself killed anyone. The prosecution said that Manson was guilty under the rule of “vicarious responsibility”. The notion that Manson’s plot to start a race war made him responsible for all the crimes committed to further it.

BRIAN DAVIS  

Remember, Vince is trying to push the agenda that Charlie just came out of nowhere and said, hey, we gotta start a race war -  Bernard Crowe, drug dealing, grand theft auto, none of that has anything to do with this. If Vince introduces anything outside of that it starts to wash away the Helter Skelter theory. Then you have that reasonable doubt creeping in. Well maybe it has something to do with the drug deal? And Vince doesn’t want you going down that road. 

CHARLES MANSON

People don’t want to look at it from the point of view that brings them to something they don’t like. 

NARRATOR

The prosecution used the race war as the basis of their legal argument. If the alternate theory is correct, might they have ignored the true nature of events to gain a conviction? Whatever Manson’s crimes are, do the ends justify the means?

GARY LAWYER  

I think if he had had a competent lawyer, he would of either walked on the trial or walked on appeal because there just wasn’t sufficient testimony to convict him of anything.

NARRATOR

To convict Manson the prosecution’s entire case depended on one of the murderers corroborating their theory. On December second, nineteen sixty-nine, four months after the death of Sharon Tate, the last of the murderers was captured. Linda Kasabian surrendered in New Mexico and returned to California. She immediately met with her attorney Gary Fleischman.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

I talked to her and the only conversation I can tell you, I said keep your mouth shut and keep it shut in that jail. Don’t talk to anybody about this ever. I can’t tell you the conversation I had with her but I was lead to believe that the murders up there started long before the Tate-Labianca case. I can’t describe what she told me but it was scary, the whole thing was scary.

NARRATOR  

At that time, Linda Kasabian had few options because Susan Atkins had already turned state’s witness. According to Gary Fleischman, he had Kasabian sabotage Susan Atkins’s testimony to bolster Kasabian’s bargaining position with prosecutors.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

I had Linda pass kites to her, in the jail. A kite is a little letter, saying in Charlie talk, Charlie talk being ‘the DA is your lawyer, Charlie is the DA’. And this Atkins was a little nuts, and she then refused to testify. So now they we’re left with Linda, period – and then negotiations started.

First they offered me murder in the second degree, I said no, then they offered me voluntary manslaughter, I said no.

She was technically guilty of first degree murder before and after the fact.

NARRATOR

Linda Kasabian was one of the four who participated in the Sharon Tate murders and was with Charles Manson the night of the LaBianca murders. Prior to that, she had only been with the group for about thirty days and had spent little time with Manson himself.

CHARLES MANSON

Nobody ratted on me, except, she didn’t rat because she didn’t know anything. What they did was, they got some of the women that didn’t know me. I can’t get in their mind.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

So, we typed up an immunity agreement and the immunity agreement said, Linda Kasabian will receive immunity if she testifies to the truth in the so-called Manson murders. The truth is as follows. I knew exactly what was necessary to convict him, and whether that was true or not it was wasn’t my business to decide. That was Vince’s business. I said Linda if you testify to that you’re going to walk out of that courtroom. 

 NARRATOR

Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles “Tex” Watson and Leslie Van Houten were all charged with murder and conspiracy. Tex Watson was arrested in Texas and faced extradition to California. With Linda Kasabian ready to testify, Watson was not brought back in time for Manson’s trial.

BRIAN DAVIS  

Tex sat out a whole year and watched that trial develop. If he had brought Tex in with him there’s no way he would have got that conviction.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

They wanted to get rid of me. I had gone to Stanford. I was really the only lawyer in the place who knew what the hell was going on. We filed a very detailed motion to get the case out of LA county.

It had like a hundred newspaper clippings and I claimed that the bad publicity was instigated by the prosecutors and that’s enough to get the case dismissed at least on appeal.

That case should have never been tried in Los Angeles county. But when we went to make a deal we withdrew the motion.

CAPPI

You should have seen my face when, when I was sitting in the in with the demure act this whole gold cross that she was fingering, and got up on the stand and said “I’m just an angel sent here from Heaven, to tell the world that Charlie’s the devil not Jesus Christ”.

CHARLES MANSON  

Listen and learn. The courtroom shows our justice. The courtroom is the eye of the social consciousness. You’ve got to go along with the courtroom. Right or wrong doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m a mass murderer in the courtroom. 

DANIEL SIMONE

In this case, Bugliosi was brilliant. He had no rivals. It came down to who the jurors believed and Manson’s own conduct which was absolutely absurd.

CHARLES MANSON

They think they’re stealing me but all they’re doing is stealing what I’ve left for them to steal. In other words, they’re plagiarizing all my dreams but I left those on the bus stop.

BRIAN DAVIS  

It literally branded Charles Manson the most evil, dangerous man in the world.

CHARLES MANSON

There’s no end to my insanity. My insanity is so much genius I’ve got five heads in one hand.

DANIEL SIMONE

None of the defense attorneys challenged that Linda Kasabian’s testimony remained uncorroborated.

CAPPI

I know how involved she was and I won’t say, but she was definitely involved, yes. 

NARRATOR

When the trial wound to a close, those associated began to fear for their lives. Many changed their names in fear of reprisal.  

CHARLES MANSON  

Live and let live. You don’t let me live, you don’t live. That’s all. If you let me live, you live.

I you don’t let me live then you get your own judgment. Everybody gets to judge themselves. I didn’t want the job, you know.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

Charlie went like this to mean, meaning I’m going to cut your throat. And I said to him “Charlie, when you get out of jail I’m going to have a turkey neck and bring you a sharp knife to cut it.” He started laughing.

PHIL KAUFMAN

They came to my house twice to kill me. My neighbor said you know guys have been crawling over your fence.

STEPHEN KAY

One night during the first trial on my way to the parking lot where I had parked, Squeaky and Sandra Good snuck up behind me and said they were going to do to my house what was done at the Tate house. 

NARRATOR

Leslie Van Houten’s attorney, Ronald Hughes, went missing during the trial. Many have speculated about his disappearance.

STEPHEN KAY

I remember we broke for the weekend on a Friday afternoon. Manson pointed directly at Ronald Hughes and said, Attorney, I don’t ever want to see you in this courtroom again.” His body was found six months later but it was so badly decomposed that they couldn’t tell the cause of death.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

I’ll bet your bottom dollar that he said something that got under Charlie’s skin, and Manson had him killed. I mean, he went up to (something) hot springs, and all of sudden he’s dead. I don’t believe it was an accident.

NARRATOR

After the first trial the Manson Family became infamous. Vincent Bugliosi published HELTER SKELTER the best-selling true crime book of all time. This began decades of movies, books, and TV shows, portraying Charles Manson as the incarnation of evil.

BOBBY BEAUSOLIEL  

It’s such an insidiously created book - It’s a curse having to live with it.

CHARLES MANSON

The DA fucked up man. Convicted me in the press, didn’t convict me in court. I got my own media.

NARRATOR

Charles Manson and the rest continued on through the courts. They received additional death sentences for the murder of Donald Shea based primarily on the testimony of Barbara Hoyt.

Tex Watson received a separate trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders and was sentenced to death like the others. The following year, the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty and all of their sentences were commuted to life in prison.

BRIAN DAVIS

The first trial, everybody was brainwashed, Tex was brainwashed, everybody went and killed for Charlie. But when Tex gets to trial he wasn’t brainwashed, he acted on his own.

NARRATOR

In November of nineteen sixty-nine, Bobby Beausoleil was tried for the murder of Gary Hinman. This was before the DA had labelled Charles Manson as the mastermind. Beausoleil’s first trial ended in a mistrial when the jury could not come to a unanimous verdict. There was no mention of Helter Skelter.

BOBBY BEAUSOLIEL

The first trial was just a quiet little trial in Santa Monica, the Jury was hung 8 to 4. I didn’t even testify because the case was really very weak. 

NARRATOR  

In a second trial, which took place after Manson was charged, Bobby Beausoleil was rebranded as a “member of The Manson Family”. He and Susan Atkins were sentenced to death alongside Manson for the murder of Gary Hinman.

BOBBY BEAUSOLIEL

They brought up this race war thing and all of that. It was horrible, man. They did a lot of insidious things.

NARRATOR  

Many of those convicted for the Tate-LaBianca murders remain in jail. Leslie Van Houten has been granted parole on numerous occasions but because of her association with Charles Manson her parole has been continually overturned.  

STEPHEN KAY

I don’t think that she deserves to get out. They we’re all lucky that they didn’t suffer the death penalty.

RICH PFIEFFER

I’m going to get her out. The DA is not operating fairly. Just follow the law, that’s all I’m asking.

NARRATOR

Lynette Squeaky Fromme served thirty-five years in prison for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Fromme was paroled in two thousand and nine. Vincent Bugliosi died in two thousand and fifteen. His book HELTER SKELTER has become gospel in terms of information on Charles Manson.

NARRATOR

Manson remains in California State Prison, Corcoran, where he will almost certainly live for the remainder of his life.

CHARLES MANSON  

That’s hard for me to believe that all this time has gone by man.

NARRATOR

Charles Manson is not an innocent man but does it matter how we know that? Should those in power be allowed to construct their own truth in the pursuit of justice?

CHARLES MANSON

I see things as they really are in truth. You got a constitution in the United States, and they read and study it in school but they never really understand the validity of it, and how powerful it really is.

GRAY WOLF

I don’t care who it is, if somebody doesn’t get a fair trial then we’re all in trouble.

GARY FLEISCHMAN

Do I think he’s suffered an injustice, not really (laughs), not in my heart of hearts. But as a matter of litigation, yes he did suffer an injustice. Whether morally he suffered an injustice I don’t think so.

NARRATOR

This leaves some to ask, if the prosecution had pursued the alternate theory with its brutal but less sensational elements, would anyone even know who Charles Manson is? And, would he be sitting in jail today? 

MANSON

I believe what I’m told to believe. Don’t you?

THE END

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Bobby BeauSoleil’s The Orkustra handbill for Cedar Alley.

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Bobby BeauSoleil The Orkustra poster from California Hall.

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Bobby BeauSoleil with the Magick Powerhouse of Oz in the Westerfeld House.

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Bobby BeauSoleil portrait in early 1980s.

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Bobby BeauSoleil at the Westerfeld House in 1967 (photo by Don Synder).

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Bobby BeauSoleil playing Lucifer Rising with the Freedom Orchestra.

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Bobby BeauSoleil - The-Orkustra Sokol Hall Poster.

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The Orkustra bumper.

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Bobby BeauSoleil with Syntar he invented.