No doubt you've read the many retrospective accounts of the Manson killings, which took place 40 years ago. Virtually all of these pieces argue that the killers personified the counterculture.
We heard the same argument in 1969. Back then, conservative newspaper and television pundits insisted that anyone who broke from the bourgeois paradigm would inevitably turn into a mass-murdering freak, just as the Manson kids did. We were told that these were murders with a message: Do not become a flower child, lest ye fall prey to les fleurs du mal. If you protest the war (Vietnam, Iraq, whatever), the spirit of Susan Atkins will commandeer your soul. Drop acid and you'll end up stabbing a pregnant woman. Assert your individualism and you'll fall prey to a cult leader. Disdain corporate culture and you will turn into the devil, come to do the devil's work.
The mass media transformed Charlie into the face of his generation.
Question: Why isn't Stephen Green considered the face of his generation?
Green and four other soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment -- Paul Cortez, James Barker, Jesse Spielman and Brian Howard -- gang-raped and murdered a 14 year old Iraqi girl named Abeer Hamza, after killing her entire family, including her six-year old sister. The crime was every bit as horrific as was the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate.
No-one in the media has ever argued that Green and company epitomize the current generation of young Americans. These killers do not represent the military. They do not represent southerners. They do not represent conservatism. They do not represent those who supported the war. They do not represent a dehumanizing popular culture.
They represent nothing but themselves. They are individuals, not symbols.
Why is that?
Why is Manson considered a living metaphor while Green is considered -- to the extent that he is remembered at all -- to be just one bad apple? (Note that this bad apple just happened to serve alongside four other bad apples, a fact which implies that any random sampling of soldiers could commit such an atrocity.) Why does the Manson Family maintain a hammerlock on the popular imagination, while everyone prefers to forget the evil wrought by those five members of the 502nd? Helter Skelter is the bestselling true crime book of all time. Nobody will write a book about the Mahmudiyah killings. You will always remember the names of Family members Krenwinkle, Atkins, LaBianca, Watson, Fromme. After you are done reading this article, you will forget the names Cortez, Spielman, Howard and Barker.
Why is that?
There are many unanswered questions surrounding the Manson crimes. Perhaps we can discuss those questions at another time. Right now, the question haunting me is sociological -- or maybe philosophical: Why do some crimes carry massive symbolic weight while others are just...crimes?
13 comments:
If those soldiers (I forget their names) had killed some movie stars I'm sure it would have been a bigger story. Of course they wouldn't become poster children for the military in the public mind.
At the risk of sounding like a groupie, this is such a good question I am besides myself.
My wife (who is American) is sick of me citing this incident whenever talk turns to the Iraq war. My comment is always the same - if we supposedly save the world when we save a life, what did America/UK do to Iraq when it "rid the world of Saddam Hussein". Apparently we gang raped and murdered this little girl and slaughtered her family to cover it up.
Harry
Some crimes support the approved narratives.
In 1968 the My Lai massacres took place, but they didn't fit the approved narrative. Our soldiers are the good guys so the ones who killed all those unarmed civilians were rogues.
Problem is, the girl and his family were Iraqis. I don't want to say there is obvious racism at work here. It's more of a "natural", incouscious racism, or rather the differenciation every human makes between Us and Them. In the mind of the Americans, even the most well-meaning, altruistic ones, inconsciously the crime has a different coloration because the people who were killed were Others.
It's a crude and simple mechanism inherited from our days where we were little tribes roaming the earth and fighting each other. And it's very cleverly taken advantage of by the imperialistic war machine. Based on this view, I think it would be better to present the war as something inherently bad for the Group (in this case, the Americans). Castigating the soldiers, even the criminal, murderous ones, will always run counter to our inborn atavisms.
The rape and murder is representative. It's representative of men at war. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is right now gathering horror stories of war-torn countries and the mass rape that is typical and representative of men all over the world.
Typical soldiers. Men in general. Rape and murder of women and children is far from uncommon. So is human trafficking of them for sexual slavery. What I wonder is when the men who don't want that all too common vile behavior to be representative of them follow the leads provided by President Jimmy Carter and columnist Bob Herbert and at long last denounce gender apartheid in all of its forms and actively reject it the way most of humanity has rejected slavery.
Human trafficking of sex slaves would not be profitable if not for the every day JOHNS, so save your breaths denying it is typical male behavior tolerated by all men.
Waiting.
Manson's cult was scary (and Charlie was equal parts cult leader and desert mob capo/thug -- re his connection to Alvin Karpis) but your question answers itself. The media was always ready then to bash the counterculture -- which it understood to be a politically dissident voice (even if most practitioners didn't). Over time, hippies have been conflated w/the successful political movements of the time, civil rights (Voting Rights Act, etc), environmental stirrings and anti-Viet war. This serves to further the right bias in our mass culture.
Maybe the names would be better known if bloggers had bothered to cover the federal trial of Steven D. Green this year. But they didn't.
As a fan of Jimmy Carter, I wonder why he practiced gender apartheid when he supported Little O over Clinton?
And who is Rusty Calley and how is he connected to Colin Powell?
btw, Manson really helped he and Capote's cause when got that ink stain on his forehead.
Hi Joseph - You could also put it this way - if Manson killed a girl in a poor Black ghetto anywhere in America would the media care? The answer unfortunately would more than likely and be "No" as well.
Is it me or has the mainsteram US media news gathering media ALWAYS been a front for whatever views the dumbass greedhead Conservative owners who run it at the time want to fool America into following?
I'm glad it had people like Murrow and Cronkite and covered the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's so very well but the media has to me always seemed to be just a front to keep America dumb. Sure I watch some cable & non-cable shows and still kind of like PBS (I could name many great shows PBS aired recently that surprised the heck out of me when I think about their conservative owners) but to me it seems like the owners of the mainstream media news orgs (cable & regular TV, radio and newspaper) all actually WANT to be Rupert Murdoch Jr. and keep the "National Discussion" on ANY big issue in America from happening.
The following is for ANY Muslim or person of Islamic faith or ANYBODY from the Middle East - I've known some actual Muslims in my time and they always like to stress the fact that when any person of Muslim faith is hurt the Muslim Brotherhood &/or Sisterhood of the world is deeply affected by it and tries to do everything it can to stop it. Hussein was running Iraq for a LONG time torturing & murdering tons of people of Muslim faith and was considered one of the true oppressive Dictators of the Middle East. SO how come Muslims from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries in the Middle East just couldn't band together with guns & money and kick him out themselves with no US support? YES I think Bush heavily screwed Iraq with Gulf War 2 but whenever I hear about the power of Muslim Brother &/or Sisterhood I just keeping "Where the hell were you when Sadaam was torturing &/or killing your Muslim brothers & sisters in Iraq all that time?"
And finally this one is for Joseph - Why are YOU actually defending the hippies? Here's what you said about them in your "Dubya vs. Gog" post:
"We were the nation of Einstein and Oppenheimer and Feynman and NASA. Then came the hippies, then came the Jesus freaks, then came the cuts in education... And now we have a population of young people who think that the radio works because it has little people inside. posted by Joseph : 4:57 AM"
UNLESS you were joking Joseph, it sounds here like you think them durty hippuhs were actually APART of the Closing of the American Mind movement. Were you joking here or no?
Chris Lark
Chris, vis-a-vis the hippies: Okay, you have me there. Kind of.
I remember the hippies. I was a kid, and we had a lot of young people coming in and out of our household, many of them musicians. (I'll tell the full story on a later occasion.)
I thought the long-hairs were fun. I liked their art, I liked their humor, I liked their attitude, I liked their love of nature.
When I was nine, I used to hang out in a Disneyland-like head shop called the Third Eye (on Ventura) and read Zap Comics despite being grossly underaged. They had the most AMAZING black light poster room.
Good times, good times.
But I also recall trying to have a sensible conversation with some hippies who were all, like, you know, Oh wow and What a trip and Everything is like just so spacey, you know?
And it was frustrating.
I was a kid, they were adults -- yet I was the one capable of rational discourse (or so I flattered myself) while they seemed to be locked into a perpetual blissed-out stupor.
My frustration was much the same as the frustration felt by the anti-war protest leaders. Trying to organize hippies was like trying to get alley cats to march single file.
So, there were lots of things I loved about the hippies: The color, the psychedelia, the freedom from bourgeois care and restraint. But I was wary of them too. They favored magical thinking. More importantly, they seemed incapable of any other kind of thinking.
A lot of the back-to-nature types turned to Jayzuss -- and then the country started to go to hell.
You know-- hippie bashing is in vogue in the green world now, as well. It's always too easy to make fun of caricatures (and yes, the memoirs of a youth hanging out in a head shop, meeting stoned hippies in a place that sells paraphernalia, fits in as caricatures).
It's a fairly easy target. in the nouveau green movement there is a great consternation of being seen as a long-hair, whereby it's easier to say the 'hippies' were wrong; the audacity of telling people to consume less, to go veg, to grow (at least some of) their own food, and to wear a sweater when cold.... what maroons! So, the nouveau green says; we're not stoners asking people to change their lives, we sell $100k electric cars, and go to chic green design shows... and that, like your memoirs, Joseph, are bunk.
On top of which it's exactly the same attitude that led to the apotheosis of Manson. It's a shortcut to thinking. Easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Were they "all" incapable of rational non-magic thinking? What about The New Alchemy Institute? NAI director John Todd is now a well respected innovator creating ways to filter industrial waste with plants and animals (i know how hippie). What about Stuart Brand (not only did the Tripps Festival in SF, but then the Whole Earth Catalog, and then the WELL). What about Stephen Gaskin? The Farm that he started was the place that eventually gave us the best Geiger counters (that the hippies made between getting stoned, I guess) and has since become the foremost center for midwifery in North America. Were Ken Kesey's books no good? What about the innovations in sound courtesy of the Grateful Dead (eventually even Audiophile Magazine had to tip their hat realizing that the Dead had mastered the amplification of live music).
I know you've blamed the Yippies and Chicago '68 for the swing back to the right. But does that mean that The Diggers and The Mime Troop were not cutting edge theater (and a great social experiment with internal critiques by people like Emmett Grogan)? What about Helen and Scott Nearing ...just fools whose work has no more meaning than John Muir?
You don't have to be an acid head to appreciate what Alice Waters has done for food, for gardening, and for rehabilitation of hardened criminals. And she too was in Berkeley in '67.
A close friend of mine was also in Berkeley in '67. He is a huge pothead, but also has developed a way to re-grow rain forests --even though media says once they're gone that's forever-- by providing 'forest gardeners' with sustenance while they grow the forest eventually making harvesting fruits and nuts and flowers into a lucrative livelihood. He does this in Brazil, Costa Rica, the Phillipines, Sri Lanka, hops around the glob, but still keeps in touch with all his old hippie friends now usually living in Oregon.
I could go on forever. There are so many positive examples of hippies doing things that help the world. I hasten to say it would be tough to find as many positive examples from the Punk Movement (aside from Food Not Bombs and a few good poets)nor from the Disco era, or even from the Rave scene. It's just easier to spread the hackneyed cliche.
And that is why Charlie and Squeeky et al "captivated" the spotlight. Ooooh! Bad Hippies! Easy copy.
...then again, we now know that it was the hippies who filled WTC7 with thermite, right? And the hippies who turned bad loans into 'securities' and of course are the ones who made us drive SUVs on foreign oil. Damn hippies!
I too, would much rather "drink the KoolAde" with the Merry Pranksters, than with Cheeto and the OBots.
Zee, if human trafficking was "typical" male behavior that by denfinition means it would be done by more than half of men, which is not the case. And if we take as a given that women by and large are as capable as men at realizing their ideals, logic dictates that since women are in the majority, it's actually women who tolerate that behavior, "typical" or otherwise.
Sergei Rostov
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