Charles Manson, serial killer, died on November 19th, aged 83

IF THERE was any code Charles Manson claimed to live by, it was that he didn’t lie. Everyone else might think that the craziest lying, but that was their problem in their minds. He put on no airs（put on airs装腔作势，to act better than one really is;to pretend to be good or to be superior）. Lived by his own truth. And since his truth told him that he was God, and love, and lived in everything, then so he was, and so he did. （既然他的真理告诉他他是上帝，是爱，存在于万物中，那么他就是如此，他也这么做了）

All that made him sound like a hippie, a word he hated, and in the late 1960s he might have been dismissed（） as just one more long-haired wild-eyed weirdo with a band of groupie women drifting round the deserts of southern California, living on weed and free love. That was before, on the night of August 9th 1969, five people and an almost-at-term（at term，足月） baby were killed at Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles. One of them was Sharon Tate, a famous actress. On the next night a grocery-chain owner, Leno LaBianca, and his wife were butchered to death in the same way. The killings terrified Hollywood, horrified America, and the trail eventually led to him.

He denied it. At his trial in 1970, along with three dizzy（愚蠢的） followers, he went on living by his own code. He came in barefoot, lunged（前冲） at the judge, carved an “X” into his forehead, punched his lawyer. He did a lot of staring at the jury and the spectators, until they looked away. The cosseted（宠爱） rich world of the murder victims was not his circle. He had nothing to do with them, no responsibility for them. So why should he care? What the hell did “care” mean?

He had made himself scarce while the killings were done. Sometimes he denied he had even suggested them. If his followers thought it was right to shoot, stab and hang these people, then it was right. He walked the line（前行） with them. They got their hands dirty. He approved of the way they had scrawled “PIGS” in blood on the walls. Pigs as in that Beatles song he liked,

      "Everywhere there’s lots of piggies

      Living piggy lives."

He had told them, if you’re going to do something, then leave something witchy（怪异的）. Just a sign to let the world know you were there. Have a good day.

This was war, anyway. The killings were meant to be blamed on Black Panthers, the first strikes in a clash of races that would engulf America. He called this “Helter Skelter”, as in another Beatles song,

"When I get to the bottom,

I go back to the top of the slide."

All the whites would be killed, except for him and his followers. Then, when the blacks found they couldn’t govern, they would call on（请求） him. He would send them back to picking cotton and become the king of the world. That was why he went to the desert, to dig that bottomless pit from Revelation Chapter 9, to hide out while the war went on. And also because he was spiritually allied with the scorpion and the wolf. In San Quentin later he made scorpions out of thread pulled from his socks.

Hobo, bum, king （一般而言tramp＞hobo＞bum）

He knew no real home but the penitentiary. His mother was an unwed little runaway（逃犯） from the hills of Kentucky, who didn’t want him. Childhood was poverty, baloney（熏肠） for Sunday dinner, petty thieving and reform schools. He set them on fire and ran away. Forging a $43 cheque got him a prison sentence of ten years in 1960. But jail was school as well as home. Give him a dark solitary cell and there was a universe in there, where he was free. He learned steel guitar and looked at Scientology; he read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Positive thinking impressed the drifter middle-class girls he met in Haight-Ashbury when he got released, in 1967. And the girls were bait to draw in men.

Soon he had a family of a shifting dozen or so.（曼森家庭有十来个成员，数量不定） He didn’t call it one himself, but it was the closest thing he’d known, and he was in control of it. His followers’ minds were wiped clean of society’s corruption to see the world his way. Often he’d put his palms to theirs and make them move as he did. Then he’d jump about, grimace（扮鬼脸）, laugh wildly, and they would do the same. These were survival techniques he had also picked up in jail, in a hundred life-death situations（生死攸关的情形）. Be whatever it suits you to be at the time. Be brand new, disconcert（使仓皇失措） people. Be zero, a nobody, be a god. Hobo, bum, tramp, king. And a straight razor, if anyone got too close.

The world had to notice him. He hoped to bend it to his will through music. Secret messages about the Apocalypse came through rock songs, and he had plenty to send. He had useful contacts with the Beach Boys, sent fan-telegrams to the Beatles. One producer who didn’t give him a recording contract was killed, the first death. He thought of the Tate house because another producer who had failed him lived there, but he had moved away. So his message got out in different blood. The album he finally cut in 1970 was called “LIE”. Then, on seven counts of murder, he was back in his usual home. For life. Fine.

He cared nothing for what people thought of him. They had their truth, he had his. If they made him a monster, or idolised him on T-shirts, that was their problem. If they saw him as evil incarnate（化身）, that was just a reflection of the evil in their own minds. In his own world he never made a bad move, was never beaten, always changing. He was life, and he was there, ready to lunge, inside everyone.