October 14, 2004

What the FMA means to me

by Li'l Jonny Darby, age 454 months

Warning: (and I am completely serious)

While safe to look at from work, the following rant contains graphic descriptions of what is probably the most famous violent crime in American history. While I have chosen not to add links to the crime scene photographs and have not dwelt on gory details, if you are bothered by descriptions of senseless human suffering, do not read this.

On the otherwise warm and pleasant night of August 8, 1969, Susan Atkins held down a screaming and terrified Sharon Tate while Charles “Tex” Watson repeatedly plunged a knife into her swollen pregnant belly. As Sharon plead hysterically for the life of her son, only two weeks from his due date and already named Paul Richard Polanski, Susan (known as Sadie within her “family”) responded with the line “I have no mercy for you bitch!*” while Tex responded by stabbing her again and again, sixteen times in all, no less than five wounds sufficient in and of themselves to kill both mother and child. Tex had a few minutes earlier fired five shots point blank into Steve Parent, a teenager whose only crime was visiting a friend in residence at the property’s guesthouse, and he had helped stab Voytek Frykowski fifty-one times (also breaking his pistol over the man’s head), completed the murder of Abigail Folger begun by other members of their expedition, and mortally wounded Jay Sebring (whom he connected to Sharon by a rope tied around each of their necks). "Sadie" completed the evening's slaughter by drinking the blood of her pregnant victim, claiming later it gave her an orgasm, and writing with it.

Two nights later Susan and Tex were among the visitors to the home of Rosemary and Leno Labianca. You all know what happened. I’ll spare you the repetition (just as I’ll spare you links to the actual unaltered color crime-scene photos of both addresses that are in several places on the Internet.) The Zapruder film and the killing of Oswald and other American crimes have been seen so many times that they're no more horrifying than the swordfight from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but no matter how many times I hear about the murders of that summer I still get chills. The 1977 TV movie, as watered down as it had to be to pass by the censors of the time, gave me nightmares for a decade.

To call it the ultimate American nightmare is wrong, because nightmares are not real; they fade, the tears and terror go away as lucidity returns. There is no lucidity in this, the blackest bead in the mass media rosary we all share in the cathedral of the Information Age. In life Sharon Tate was one of the most beautiful women in the world as well as by all accounts an incredibly nice person and in death she will always conjure notions of ugliness and evil. May a day return when her name is divorced of horror and again evokes only images of beauty and sweetness.

Atkins and Watson did what they did in part to liberate their friend Bobby Beausoleil from prison by transacting a copycat crime that would cast doubt on his guilt. A few weeks earlier Susan had helped Bobby torture and murder a small time drug dealer, the complete process taking days and involving a severed ear and numerous stabbings similar to those at the Tate/LaBianca residences. The LAPD solved all of the crimes in spite of themselves (famously bungled) and all three of the above, along with their confederates, were convicted and sentenced to death.

Beausoleil, Atkins and Watson are alike in more ways than they are not.
All three are still alive today courtesy of “activist judges”. All three reside in California prisons (at a cost to the taxpayers of $32,000 per year each). All three come up for parole periodically, all three try to get out whenever they do, saying they’ve learned their lesson.

All three were followers of Charles Manson. Now all three say “meh, he wasn’t all that… I don’t know what we were thinking”. In fact thirty-five years later all three claim they are filled with remorse (which I hope is true, if only so that they know rotting in a prison cell until they die, hopefully in pain, is a fate a thousand times better than they deserve).

Watson and Atkins are born-again Christians. While always a good career move when seeking parole in the secular courts, I don't doubt their sincerity: certainly no human within three standard deviations of sanity could or would grant absolution for their deeds, leaving only the supernatural to tell them “all you did was brutally murder an unborn child and a group of completely helpless people with a savagery that would have raised eyebrows at Auschwitz** and made seasoned crime investigators and morgue workers vomit- no sense beating yourself up over it”..

All three destroyed the physical lives of their victims and the emotional lives of their victims’s families (and, for that matter, their own families).

All three are considered by George Bush to be less dangerous to the American nukular family unit and more deserving of the sacred than I am.

While their trips down death row were unfortunately cut short, Beausoleil, Atkins and Watson have all three made it down the aisle. Susan has married twice, first to a self-described Texas oil billionaire she divorced when she learned that his fortune was as non-existent as her compassion, then to her current husband Jimmy Whitehouse, a Harvard graduate and lawyer twenty years her junior with whom until last year she enjoyed two conjugal visits per month***. In 1982 Bobby Beausoleil gave up his wild swinging bachelor days as a self-admitted prison rapist for the old ball & chain by marrying Barbara, a dancer and artist who manages his web site and serves as agent for his artwork**** and music.

Most heartwarming of all is Tex Watson , who married his wife Kristin in 1979 and through conjugal visits has fathered four children who visit daddy at at his workplace. What’s really special: Watson is also an ordained minister and supports his family through the sale of his books and videos on his ministry’s web site (where he also reviews the remake of Helter Skelter for accuracy).

Watson and Atkins are both supported in their bids for parole, incidentally, by Jan & Paul Crouch and several other conservative Christian ministers who feel that the blood of Baby Jesus trumps that of the other half-Jewish baby whose blood figures so prominently in their life.

Three people, nine murders (that we know of), 180 stab wounds, 105 years served in prison. Four marriages, four children. Countless millions of dollars have been spent by now for the trials and maintenance of this merciless trio who not only contributed nothing of their own to society but ended the ability of others to contribute, who shattered far more lives than they ever helped and who brought nightmares to people who never met them.

Susan Atkins is now fifty-six years ol d. When she was a pre-school age child in California, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin began living together in the same state. Phyllis & Del were an “old married couple” in all save legality by the time Manson began assembling his followers a few blocks from their Castro home. Phyllis wrote a definitive book on lesbianism in America and Del a definitive book on domestic violence. They bought a house and raised a daughter together; fifty one years after the began their partnership they live in the first house they bought, their daughter is an award winning social worker, and their neighbors and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and friends all accept them as a loving married couple.

When it came time to rule as null and void a marriage it had granted, the state of California chose not to annul the freakish union of a woman who had already molested her own infant son by the time she considered tearing out the fetus of an innocent woman she helped murder to give it as a prize to the barely literate rapist/murderer/pimp/drug-dealer/thief she worshiped as God. Instead, they invalidated the marriage of Phyllis & Del. (Barabbas, your ride is here.)

The day Susan Atkins married her husband(s) she instantly had more indissoluble rights than the 600,000 gay households who self identified in the 2000 census will ever have if George Bush has his preference. The Phyllis & Dels of America are so much more to be feared by Ma & Pa America that Dubya feels the need to amend the Constitution to defend the rights of the Tex Watsons of the world from the corrupting sinful influence of the Del Martins, to make sure that when people see Susan Atkins they know that she is far more deserving of the "sanctity of marriage" than, say, Gore Vidal (a man who has paid millions in taxes yet received no tax breaks while living with or federal death benefits when he recently lost his domestic partner of fifty years). The pieces of subhuman excrement who personify the most evil deed in the annals of American crime are more worthy of this "sacred institution" than any queer couple alive, and more importantly, this should be recognized by the most important document in the nation's history.

Whether you approve of the right of prisoners sentenced to death for heinous crimes to marry or not is irrelevant; they have it, it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court repeatedly (“the right to marry is of fundamental importance”), and those who have partaken of the rights include Ted Bundy (who fathered a child while on death row), the Brothers Menendez, Richard Ramirez, Karla Faye Tucker and many others who instantly received rights that no court or civil authority can legally revoke without the consent of the newlyweds and that no queer can enjoy with their partner of 40 years.

And… surprise surprise… the sky didn’t fall for conventional marriage. The fact that mass murdering monsters were afforded the same legal protections and entries into the “holy sanctity” of marriage did not seem to even slightly dampen the desires of decent people to enter into the same covenant anymore than- gasp- Loving v. Virginia did a generation before when activist judges redefined marriage to the extent that people of entirely different races were allowed to enter into unions (at a time when miscegenation had significantly less support in the polls than gay marriage has now).

But gays relationships are not entitled to the same protection as interracial marriages because George Bush doesn’t know, “I just don’t know” whether it’s a choice (here’s a hint prez: ask any major objective mental health agency or for that matter a gay person- you’d be surprised how normal they look up close [and in case you haven’t received one of the Kerry/Edwards “I needlessly brought up Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter in front of the nation and all I got was this T-shirt” T shirts, that’s a clue where to start) and even if it is then it doesn’t fit his opinion of marriage based on his Christian ethics.

The fact that Christ himself never mentioned a word about homosexuality doesn’t seem to influence him anymore than the fact that the same Christ rattled on constantly about the sinfulness of divorce and remarriage has spawned a “Ban Divorce” amendment inititiative or anymore than the fact that Jesus specifically said in every Gospel that marriage doesn’t exist in heaven has stopped any conservative from calling it a “holy union”. Hardly a surprising inconsistency from the camp that sees no inconsistency between their Messiah's injunction to “turn the other cheek… love those who hate you” and their president's instructions to “bomb Iraq”, resulting in a situation where the battle deaths of Americans in the prime of their life is so quotidian that bodycounts are exiled to a crawler while a grinning newscaster discusses Britney’s new look on the full screen.

Why do you feel this needs a Constitutional Amendment? I don't know, George, I just don't know. But I do know that as much as I loathe Kerry I have enough self respect not to vote for a person who wants to make me Constitutionally lower than Ted Bundy.

Official conclusion soon

*There are variations on this that Atkins has given over the years, but all are in the same general vein and this seems to be the most frequently given version.

**Auschwitz was where Sharon Tate's mother-in-law (and her baby's grandmother) died. Who would have thought that her death would be tame in comparison to her family's next two generations.

***Whitehouse is currently attempting to reclassify the little Mrs. as a “political prisoner” to expedite her parole, citing as evidence that the revocation of her conjugal visits also denies her visits with her attorney (him). She’s certainly not the first prisoner who can claim her lawyer screwed her, but she may be the first to complain that he stopped.

****I haven’t listened to his music (though he has provided the score for two “underground” films from prison), but giving the devil his due, his artwork is very good. (So it Atkins’s, actually.)

What else does Jon think about gay marriage? Read here (or here... or here).