Hasn't Enough Been Said About Charles Manson?

a satire

Hasn’t Enough Been Said About Charles Manson?
A Closet Drama
By Michael Goodwin Hilton


Dramatis Personae: 
Kate: a woman/ wife/ mother/ reader/ culture critic/ armchair theologian/ on-again-off-again mythologist. 
Kate’s husband: some guy.
Kate’s baby: a baby.
People in the airport: random people (faces optional), numbering in the low-to-mid hundreds.
Emperor T.: President of the United States of America whose gargantuan face is broadcast nonstop on any and every wide-screen television in the vicinity. He appears in various emotional or non-emotional states, including raging red, blasé, jocular, choleric, solicitous, absent-minded, rabidly degrading, to name a few. There are also occasional close-ups of his face asleep on a pillow. 
Setting:
An airport lounge at JFK. 
Time: 
Toward the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

(SCENE: Kate and her husband are waiting to board their flight at JFK International Airport. The flight is delayed, likely because of inclement weather, and Kate’s baby is asleep on Kate’s husband’s arm. He appears restless and would like very much to stand and stretch his legs. Emperor T. is on the screen in the background, the sound is off but his face is raucous. People are milling around the gate, forming useless and arbitrary line, which continue to grow steadily. Kate returns with a paperback book from a nearby bookshop. Kate’s husband looks happy to see her until he realizes he won’t be getting up anytime soon.)

                                                                      KATE
(throwing the book down) It’s redundant! Absolutely redundant! Another book about the Manson Family. This one a novel. A young woman wrote it. That’s at least three by my count. Young fiction writers, women especially it seems, are continually gravitating toward the Manson Family. And that’s to say nothing of film and television. They have Charles Manson appearing in all these sixties crime dramas that are streaming right now. That horror series as well. I’m pretty sure they’re developing a show based entirely on him and his cult. Not to mention the movie that just came out. Have we really not had enough? Is there really so much to say about this person, this group of losers that we still feel the need to stare at and chew over and think about? Seriously! Hasn’t enough been said already? How much more is there to say about Charles fucking Manson?! 

(Kate sits heavily. Kate’s husband tries to get her attention, raising the sleeping baby in his arms, proffering it so that he can pee. Kate stands up again.)  

It’s the cult thing, isn’t it? You hear that word all – the – time! So-and-so belongs to a cult. They’re not a political party anymore, they’re a cult. You-know-who’s rallies are cult gatherings. Every time you look at the news, some pundit is throwing the word ‘cult’ around. That’s what we’re surrounded by. Cult, cult, cult, cult, cult, cult, cult! On constant replay. So then no wonder we’re talking about the Manson Family so much. I say ‘cult’ you say ‘Manson.’ Ready? ‘Cult’ – ‘Manson’ – ‘Cult’ – ‘Manson’! Way to go! Who started it? Who is responsible for recycling the image and the idea of that lunatic, over and over and over again?

(Emperor T’s face flashes incessantly around them. People are streaming in from all sides, adding to the already rapidly growing lines of people at the gate.) 

It’s the size, isn’t it? It’s all too much. It’s been too much for too long. Ever since the beginning. Of this century, I mean. Terrorism. Genocide. Civil Wars. Climate Change. It’s all too big. There are too many moving parts. We can’t hold the thread. There is no thread. An endless serious of larger-than-life events that no one can influence. We like to tell ourselves we can still influence. But let’s be honest. It’s too enormous. There are too many images. Manson is small. It’s repulsive and deranged, but it’s small. It’s grungy and indulgent and sad. We get it. An unwashed tribe roaming around southern California, looking for an angry fix and all that. It was incoherent, but there’s a thread. You can trace it, roughly. There was a climax. But no moral. Is that what we’re still trying to figure out? Are we stuck on “what is the moral of the story?” Spoiler alert. There is no moral! A bunch of young people did a shit ton of drugs and fucked each other’s brains out in the desert, and then they went out and killed some people. And one of them was a young woman, more or less famous, almost nine months pregnant. The end. This was not about America’s corrupted innocence. Not paradise lost. These were not the forgotten youth of a nation. None of that shit. No allegory. No lesson. Nothing. Remember that Rolling Stones piece about Manson? What was it, the “most dangerous man alive”? Really, Rolling Stone? That pipsqueak? Not Pol Pot? Not one of the thousands of maniacs waging chemical warfare against children around the world, including our own government? That delusional runt? Okay, I get it: we got it. But still. Gimme a break! And yet, we’re all still so drawn to him. We’ve formed a cult centered around his cult. Not old Charles, Lord no. Not pathetic old man, faded-swastika-on-forehead Charles. No one wants to see that. We want young, lithe Charles. We want limber, charismatic Charles, leaping from boulder to boulder. We want long-haired, thick-bearded, Jesus’s-diabolical-twin-Charles. He never actually wielded the knife. Smart boy. He knew that if he had we’d have stopped being mesmerized long ago, most likely. He knew that. He knew how to keep his brand going. No, he’s not the brute in our minds, not the slaughterer, not the war god. He’s Loki. He’s Lucifer. The sly one. The sexy one. The trickster god. The whisperer in the garden. Take a bite. He doesn’t want you to but you want you to. That apple belongs to you. It’s yours. He’s the fallen angel dodging and confounding the other gods. Leading the charge of renegade angels to retake, or at least ransack, the Kingdom. That’s what we want from him anyway. We’ve added him to our pantheon. He’s part and parcel of the only truly, actually holy place America has: Hollywood. Their conjurer. Their magician. Their morning star. Their Hades. Sharon Tate’s in there too, of course. She’s the Holy Mother. They were both created by Hollywood. And Hollywood created America, not the other way around. (Pause.) I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Or if it’s even true. (Longer pause.) It really is too much for most people. Too many bodies. Too many crowds. Everyone’s gathering, crowding. Uniting. It doesn’t move the dial much, though, does it? Things kinda…stick. That’s what it looks like from the outside anyway, as someone who doesn’t do crowds. It looks to me like there are more and more people making less and less of a difference. There was a time when a crowd could move the needle, right? Woodstock. March on Washington. We still carry these images. We want those crowds again. They made dents in the culture. The 60’s, of course. If it didn’t happen in the 1960’s, then it may as well have never happened, as far as America is concerned. Hold on. Let me try that again. If it didn’t happen in the 1960’s, then it may as well have never happened in America. Is that any better? (Kate is not really asking.) That’s the decade we found out the gods are vulnerable, that they can be brought down. JFK. RFK. MLK. All the K’s. And then there’s Charles, doing his shadow dance out there on the edge of the universe at the tail end of a hyper-turbulent decade. Jeez, did I really just say that? Am I that much of a cliché factory? (Pause.) What else is there to say?

(Kate’s husband is banging his head against the backrest of his chair. The baby raises both its hands abruptly then lets them fall back slowly and continues sleeping. The lines of people continue to grow exponentially around them. Emperor T. is sitting on a man-sized rocking horse on television and a lot of people wearing cowboy hats are standing around applauding. Kate doesn’t pay much attention to any of it. She’s still trying to think of something meaningful to say about Charles Manson.)

I know this is redundant, by the way. Don’t worry, I’m well aware. (Pause.) Hollywood isn’t American’s holy place anymore. It was for a long time but I don’t think it is anymore. It sure wishes it was. That’s why so many of the movies it makes now feel so neurotic, so cloistered. Movies about making movies. Who are they actually communicating with? Its columns came crashing down a long time ago. Brought down by the all-soul. The Internet. Either the final replacement or the fullest reproduction of God on Earth. Don’t tell me it’s not. An entity that knows what you’re thinking before you think it. If that’s not God, I don’t know what is. (Pause.) The 60’s really was the heyday. When brightly lit figures projected onto large screens performed the country’s religious rites. High priests wearing cowboy hats or clad in camouflage gear. Or straddling subway grates with air blowing up their skirts. Spiritual power cranked to maximum wattage. Not just the 60’s, of course. We’re pining for the 20th century in general, I think. For all its horror and bullshit, the century offered a lot of closure. Things began and ended. World War I began and ended. World War II began and ended. Korea. Vietnam. Vietnam was probably the last war America actually understood. The Cold War, too vague. Persian Gulf, what was that about? Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t even ask. The 20th century had timelines. Things happened until they didn’t happen anymore. I imagine 9/11 severed most timelines. It generated new ones, of course, but I can’t help thinking that we want the old ones back. We need clarity. (Kate glances briefly at the screen.) I guess that’s what he gives us. Clarity. I mean, stop me if I’m wrong. But that’s what he offers. We get it. And on some level most of us are grateful. Let’s be brutally, unforgivably honest for a moment. He’s the first thing in a really long time about which pretty much everyone knows how they feel. You love him, you know it. You hate him, you know it. He brought things back down to the ground. Suddenly everyone’s doing a crash course on democracy. What’s it about? Oh we can do that? Oh he can do this? Suddenly everyone knows something about everything, and everyone hates each other a little bit more. I know I do anyway. I really wish I didn’t hate everyone so much. I do, though. I hate the world and almost everyone in it. I wish I didn’t but I do. (Pause.) He’s given us a word – a syllable – against which to define ourselves and, even better, our reality, or lack thereof. I wonder if deep down, like way down, his fiercest detractors don’t secretly hope he sticks around longer. I feel the same way about a lot of the protestors in the ‘60’s. Not the real ones, mind you, not the ones risking their lives down south. I mean more the rich white kids drinking their parents’ Scotch then railing against “the man” while wiping their asses with the American flag out in the streets. Did they really hate the Vietnam War, or did they love hating the Vietnam War? Stop me if I’m being cynical. I just wonder…about him now…are we through with him yet? Or are we addicted to the clarity he gives us? (Pause.) That’s a terrible thing to say, I’m sure. Why am I so afraid all the time? Of everything. Of every little thing. 

(Kate looks up. Her husband is asleep. His pant legs are dark from pissing himself. The crowds are pressing into nearly every corner of the waiting area. They’re pressing so hard against the glass that it shatters and waves of bodies spill out onto the tarmac then clamber back up and charge at the airplanes stationed around the gates and begin toppling them over one by one. A rampage of bodies. On the largest screen, Emperor T. dons a rainbow-colored propeller beanie hat and begins crossing and uncrossing his eyes in random intervals over the course of several minutes, the camera never cutting away, not even for a microsecond. Kate’s baby stirs. Kate focuses on it and it alone.)

To hell with Manson. Okay, so he gave America something it could understand. Something that didn’t need to be interpreted. A common gasp. A communal revulsion. An ultimate democratic dread. The almighty “oh please no don’t oh God please no not that!” It was clear. And it still is. I’m tired of trading truth for clarity. (Pause.) Don’t ask me what that means.  

(Kate picks up her baby. The airport is in flames around her, and her own husband may or may not still be breathing. Kate holds her baby as close as she can without crushing it.)

Someday, we’ll have freed ourselves from Charles’s America. I look forward to meeting you there.

(Kate’s baby opens its eyes. Kate opens her mouth to say something else. The lights go out.)
                                                                  CURTAIN