I recently needed a change of pace. I needed to read something that didn’t require note-taking or having my scholarly mind going. I have started and been unable to complete several books aimed at several topics that directly benefit my function as a pastor. I needed something that would just stimulate me as a person.
Several months ago, I saw a Joe Rogan interview with a man named Tom O’Neill. The man was talking about history from the late-1960s in America. I had just gotten done listening to Darryl Cooper’s (Martyr Made) series, “God’s Socialist,” which covered the rise and fall of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, and I needed to know more about that era.
As a child born in the 1980s, it took me a long time to realize that the country had gone through something big only 15 or so years before I was born. I had learned of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK before, and I knew about the Vietnam War, but the way my folks and others talked about this time conveyed that I didn’t really have any clue what was going on. It was only recently that I learned about the militant groups that got a national audience, whether it was the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weather Underground. I had heard of the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but the intersection of these forces with a very hostile, conservative government was new history to me. It seemed to me that the 1960s, with its love of The Beatles and The Beach Boys, its space race, its flower child hippies, was a time of great optimism, and I guess it was, but it all came crashing down with the Manson murders.
O’Neill wrote this book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” and it covered a lot of these different pieces from another angle. Cooper’s Martyr Made series, which I referenced just above, is informed by a very conservative worldview. O’Neill is the opposite. Yet it would seem that there is now enough distance between the present and the 1960s for people in very different places on the liberal/conservative continuum to look back and note just how strange a time it was. It is fun when both sides achieve a horseshoe affect, where they arrive at pretty much the same place despite different loyalties.
A couple years ago, Bari Weiss interviewed Ryan Holiday, a modern author and public stoic. The title of the conversation was, “You’re being lied to.” Holiday talked about how pretty much any major media event has been widely distorted and misrepresented. He doesn’t represent THE MEDIA as some bogeyman, as I recall. Rather, he says that information-gathering in the short term is so fraught that the media setup we have cannot give good information. There is just too much ignorance, uncertainty, and bias. So if one wants to get a true understanding of what happened during the events that have shaped our nation, then one needs to take the time to read the books of those who have done the prolonged hard work of reconstructing what has happened. This sort of investigative work takes time, money, resources, and patience. One must read books, not newspapers, magazines, and articles, to properly understand the world.
Deep down, I knew this, but I needed someone to say it. For years, my lifestyle has been informed by digital articles that disappear into the ether as soon as I read them. I used to save them and organize them, but then I never actually used them. I needed books. I needed something tactile with an identifiable worldview, offering a prolonged analysis of a complex and interconnected topic.
What follows isn’t my usual content because the subject material isn’t my usual fare. Nobody in this book I’m writing about is a Christian. Christ doesn’t inform any of this stuff directly. Yet at the end I have some serious reflections on faith in response to the realities highlighted in this book. Christ is, after all, the Savior from our world. It helps to be regularly reminded what we need saving from.
So, now, the book covers the events and personalities around the Manson murders. Ironically, there isn’t much time or attention spent on Manson, himself. Charles Manson was a very sad, very damaged, manipulative man. He was a dysfunctional person, institutionalized from an early age, violating other people sexually and otherwise, but eventually becoming untouchable by law enforcement in the Los Angeles area. He lived outside of the city at a place called Spahn Ranch, where he and his small cult called The Family lived, were obsessed with sex, stole Volkswagen Beatles to convert into sand buggies, and did lots of drugs (especially LSD/acid). He was a known criminal, and yet the LA police were instructed never to hassle him. He was arrested several times for obvious offenses, but then simply released.
Manson gained the friendship and ear of Dennis Wilson, one of the members of The Beach Boys, who actually let Manson and his harem live with him for a time. Manson sold drugs and hung out with many of the most influential people in LA, including Terry Melcher, whose house was eventually rented out to Roman Polanski, whose wife and a few of her friends/housemates were eventually murdered by some of Manson’s followers.
There were so many characters in this story, most of them very sad people. Even the famous people like Roman Polanski, Mama Cass, and Dennis Wilson were all so messed up and ugly in their personal lives. It is so strange to me that a country founded by Puritans can make its way in this direction. The rampant debauchery and drug use that was normal in those days scandalizes me.
O’Neill’s particular concern was to investigate the ways in which different state actors seemed to conspire to keep the truth about Manson’s life and behavior secret. He and his crew apparently murdered several other people, some of them in the months between the famous murders and his eventual arrest. Many of these murders were actively covered up by law enforcement. Manson seems to have been connected to at least two government spooks/spies, both of whom would have helped him learn to manipulate people with LSD and get away with his crimes. A couple of the people O’Neill interviewed alleged that Manson was actually an informant.
A lot of people aren’t aware that the US Federal Government got overtly power crazy in the 1960s. Well, J. Edgar Hoover and others tried to hide it, but the Church Commission, Seymour Hersh, and others exposed that the FBI and the CIA had both been surreptitiously interfering in domestic politics. In the context of the Cold War it was decided that the government couldn’t continue to let people just do what they do. Rather, Communists were interfering with the social fabric and had to be stopped. So programs like COINTELPRO (in the FBI) and CHAOS (in the CIA) were formed to spy and experiment on thousands of American citizens. Agents would often infiltrate American groups to turn people against one another. I honestly believe this is somewhat directly responsible for the devastating decline in social capital in America today. For decades, under the surface, Americans sensed that they were being manipulated by malign forces. Yet, despite how much we know, so much has been hidden and destroyed. I never knew until this book that the documentation that our government vowed to supply to the public after the Church Commission just disappeared. It was never given. The American public just let it all get swept under the rug.
As Rod Dreher chronicles in his, “Live Not By Lies,” participating in a lie long enough collectively has a demoralizing effect. Populations eventually enter somewhat of a mass formation psychosis when they have been manipulated too long. Today, people like Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, Michael Shellenberger, Peter Boghossian, and Glen Greenwald regularly show the ways in which American hegemonic power never stopped interfering, but has actually infiltrated every part of society to control and disrupt our society. Even so, most people are either unaware, or they have learned to indifferently navigate their lives, taking this interference for granted. Most people that I have spoken to about these things get uncomfortable; some get angry.
O’Neill’s CHAOS painted a portrait for me of a very lost world, a very sick society, that protected evil at the expense of the innocent. In every age, in every culture, the sinful world has ways that it self-justifies. Anything can be justified if people can subjectively rationalize why it is that sin is necessary. O’Neill doesn’t do any of this reflection. He’s a gay journalist who has reported on celebrities all his life. His commentary is undergirded by a sort of flimsy common sense notion that it is wrong to lie to the American public, or something to that effect.
I saw a quote recently:
I remember a day in seminary when a guest speaker came and tried to get the students upset about some social justice issue or another. I started to feel manipulated. I eventually shrugged and kind of made fun of the lady for her hysterics. It seems to me that worldly corruption and the social justice movement feed off one another in this eternal soap opera, where individuals are inducted into one side or another, or they are so demoralized as to keep their heads down, pay their taxes, post a black square on their profile picture, and hope that nobody messes with them.
The authentic Christian response sits outside of all of this, I believe. A true believer is to be unsurprised and undeterred by the sinfulness of individuals or corporate entities in the world. A sober Christian expects for messed up things to happen, as they understand that people are messed up! But because we are unsurprised, we are also not discouraged, outraged, or otherwise emotionally affected when the details of corruption are exposed. Rather, we continue on throughout our lives, rendering to caesar what is due, but also serving the poor, speaking the truth, blessing our cities, helping our neighbors and, most importantly, worshiping and growing in knowledge of the Lord.
The world wants to get us spun up so that we will not do these things. I think Christians have to resolve not to get spun up, nor to be cowed by worldly threat. I think we need to patiently minister to this world, firmly insisting that it cannot save itself and, yes, badly needs to be saved. To that end, I think we should learn the stories in the different chapters of the failure of the world to regulate itself. The chapter of the late-1960s with its free love culture and the hubris of thinking they were going to achieve world peace without Jesus needs to be known. The massive failure of good intentions throughout history needs to be recited regularly by Christians, in particular, as we point towards the only true source of salvation and peace.
I wish for a future in which Christians are not known for ignorance, but are actually agents of knowledge and wisdom in our world. People who act with charity and patience amidst the world’s drama are needed. Those kinds of people do not get produced magically—they are formed in the crucible of authentic local churches. I would have us recommit ourselves to the project of being salt and light in the world. When we do that soberly, we see the world for what it is, and we do what we are called to do, recognizing the time is short and the days are evil.
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
- Matthew 5:13-16
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
- Ephesians 5:15-17
This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short.
- 1 Corinthians 7:29
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
- Mark 1:15
I believe this is a very desperate time when support of Jesus, his church and his devoted and faithful leaders is much needed in order to show our appreciation of the salvation he has given us.