Rant #2,027: The End

The demon is dead.

Charles Manson, the very symbol of the evil side of the flower power 1960s, has died.

He was 83, and died in prison, where he has spent nearly 50 years withering away, explaining his actions to anyone that would listen to him, and even getting married while incarcerated.

Manson was supposedly a failed musician who even with his lack of ability, somehow worked his way into the pop and rock scene in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1960s, hobnobbing with the musical elite while still being on the outside of it all.

He complained that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys stole his music and made it their own, and he supposedly snapped, deciding to exorcise his demons by murder--not by his own hand, but by the hands of his followers.

Through persuasion, bending of the lifestyle, and a heap of drugs, he formed a group of followers to do his bidding, and his ultimate bidding was the murder of several young people in a house where top rock producer Terry Melcher (the son of Doris Day) was renting along with Mark Lindsay, lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders.

The place was sublet at the time, and others were staying there when Manson and his Family did their dirty deed. Several people were killed over a two-day span, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and later, he and the heinous acts of his cult of young drifters were memorialized, for better or worse, in the book "Helter Skelter" by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.

The book was named after a Beatles song that Manson was supposedly obsessed with.

Again, Manson did not directly murder anyone. However, his directions to his fellow doped up "Family" to do his bidding made him accessories to all the murders, and made him the very essence of evil during that period.

If Woodstock was the high point of the late 1960s scene, then certainly the Manson murders were the low point.

During the past nearly 50 or so years, he has become the very essence of evil to the public, carving a swastika into his forehead, spouting venom to anyone who would listen, and laughing all the way back to his jail cell while doing all of this.

Really, the less said about his sordid life the better, but the thought came to me: what happens now in death?

He had no next of kin, although he was supposedly married while in jail a few years back. I don't know what happened with that marriage, perhaps it was annulled, but the fact of the matter is that I don't believe he had any next of kin.

What to do with the body? I would think that if it is not claimed--and why would anyone claim it--the authorities can either bury it or cremate it.

Manson must have had some belongings, so what happens with those?

That being said, if there is any money involved in selling whatever belongings he had, whatever is gained should be put into something good, programs to help someone.

I think that that would be a fitting end to his life, that even a life like he had could end up doing something good in death.

That's if anyone actually wanted whatever his few belongings were.

Manson lived a troubled life from almost the get-go. He was born as the child of an unwed mother, and reports are his mother was actually a prostitute.

He was in trouble almost from the moment he could speak and stand on his own two feet, and once, while a teenager, he was incarcerated for a petty crime, and during probably one of the few lucent moments in his life, he told the presiding judge that he did not want to be freed from jail, because "Jail is the place I call home."

I paraphrased what he said, but heck, it ended up that he was spot on.

Jail was the only place he felt comfortable in, and he lived most of his life incarcerated for one thing or another.

As for his Family, all of them, I believe, are still incarcerated or died in prison.

Just to sum everything up, Manson was the pure personification of evil, and his existence demonstrated that the 1960s were not all flowers and blowing bubbles into the wind.

Maybe he lived so long to remind us of all that.