Murder Satan in California

126 pages; $1.00.

AMERICA'S popular culture, the most durable product this nation has for exportation to the rest of the Western world, is a constantly changing conglomeration of fads, life-styles and heroes: about forty years ago it was crossword puzzles and dance marathons; in the fifties it was quiz-shows and hoola hopps; in the last decade it was the twist and Jackie Kennedy. The culture moves so fast that one never can be quite sure of what is happening until the latest issue of Life (mainstream-pop culture) or Rolling Stone (counter pop-culture) arrives in the mail box. As Norman Mailer said a few weeks ago, only one factor of our national life is unchanging: "This country is a bitch."

Yet, if one examines the popular culture of this century, it becomes clear that one of its many elements does remain constant. That element is murder. Games and dance crazes come and go, but murder-and all its paraphernalia, guns and knives and rope-stays in style year after year. Remember Leopold and Loeb, Lizzie Borden, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Lindberg kidnapping, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde and Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy? If not, how about Texas sniper Charles Whitman, Chicago nurse murderer Richard Speck, the Boston Strangler and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood?

The sixties-like their counterpart, the twenties gave us new kinds of murders, the likes of which this country had not seen before. Not only did we have the old-fashioned type of homicide, but we had torrents of political murders (four major assassinations, the Panthers, My Lai) and drug murders. The problem is that these three categories of sixties-style slaughter are sure bets to hold over (and possibly flourish) in this new decade. This month along has given us Augusta, Jackson and Kent State.

For what it is worth, however, we now have the number of the politically motivated murderers within our midst-and geniticists are now beginning to enlighten us about plain old pathological murderers. But what about the drug murderers? How much do we know about them? At this point not much.

So far, the only book to appear on this subject is ???ckie paperback, The Killing of Sharon Tate. It is a calculated exploitational work of popular culture, complete with pseudo-sociology, gore, glamour and inexplicit sex. As escapist reading however, it isn't a hell of a lot of fun.

Killing has two parts (not to mention a disappointing "8 Pages of Photographs"). The book begins with a narrative of the case's history, as written by Lawrence Schiller, a journalist of questionable credentials. The book's second half consists of the recollections of one of the accused murderers, Susan Atkins.

Schiller's contribution to this tome is eminently disposable, unless you missed all the newspaper accounts of the crime last summer. His sociological points are mainly vulgarizations of important issues of the case that have already been discussed more intelligently in such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine and Esquire. (Some of Schiller's ramblings, though, do have a sick sense of humor about them: "It was a satanic whim which sent [the Manson tribe to the Polanski home]. But Mr. and Mrs. Middle America need not be smug. That whim could have been saved for their house.")

MISS ATKINS' story has a little more substance to it, although it too merely touches on the many topics that must be sorted out if acid crimes are to be understood and prevented in the future. She tells, in a pathetically disjointed monologue, about her unhappy childhood (broken, alcoholic home): her extensive and sad sex life; her LSD experiences; her initiation into the Manson commune; her participation in the killing of actress Sharon Tate and her four house guests, and, a week later, in the "Copy Cat Murders" of a wealthy grocer and his wife.

Her account is particularly important for its detailing of the personality of Charles Manson, the alienated ex-con who held apparently total psychic control over the female commune members. She explains how Manson first won her over (by his rendition of the song, "The Shadow of Your Smile"), how Manson saw homicide as a means of instilling "fear in Man himself, Man, the Establishment," how Manson set himself up as a combination of God and Satan, how Manson sought to set off a black versus white blood-bath, how Manson established male chauvinism as one of the commune's fundamental principles. ("I never questioned what Charlie said," Miss Atkins writes. "I just did it.")

From this fragmentary account and the serious magazine articles that have been written about the case, one can gradually discover some of the new issues this case raises about the use of LSD and mescaline. While, on the one hand, we know these drugs to be often conducive to psychologically peaceful and loving states of mind, the Manson commune brings home the fact that an opposite reaction is also possible.

According to Dr. David Smith, director and founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, Charles Manson, like many people who trip, was susceptible to prolonged periods of schizophrenia and feelings of omnipotence. But unlike middle-class college kids who trip towards "peace," Manson's background turned his trip into a journey towards "evil." Unlike students who are alienated from the Government and capitalism, Manson was alienated from everything. He had had a rough lower-middle-class upbringing (he was tossed from home to home), had spent many years in jail, had failed in an attempt to break into show business. He was more or less apolitical and apparently had a great fear of blacks. His idea of revolution was one in which whites and blacks destroyed each other, while he and his commune escaped to start a new civilization in Death Valley. He saw all men-all except those in his commune-as "the Establishment."

Manson conceived of himself as both God and Devil-and was evidently able to convince only a certain type of drop out (mainly uneducated, homeless and delinquent girls) to accept him totally in these roles. But in the acts of ritualized murder his followers committed, Manson's role of Devil, not God, held sway.

UNTIL this communal homicide took place, the two-way potential of drug trips was an ignored or largely uninvestigated fact. Only now are we beginning to realize that hip college students and intellectuals are not the only drop-outs and trip-takers. Only now do we begin to realize fully the alternatives that John Lennon and Mick Jagger, peaceful Woodstock and murderous Altamont, Christ and Satan represent in terms of the counter culture. Only now is it becoming obvious that the underside of our culture is grist for the mill of the increasingly homicide-oriented national culture.

Over the years, American writers such as Nathaniel West and Ross MacDonald have taken Southern California as a symbol for a national apocalypse to come. Now Charles Manson has given this symbol a new dimension. Unless we pursue the drug murders committed in our name with the same fervor we pursue the political murders being committed in the name of our parents, the Day of the Locust may turn out to be a plague on both our houses.