HeLtEr sKeLteR: CHENEY/MANSON 08

“One’s file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead.”
-- Graham Greene, “The Third Man”

I think Vincent Bugliosi likes to write about drugstore cowboys, or perhaps better, criminal ranchers. Why? 1) as a former Los Angeles county prosecutor, he is a public beacon for truth, justice, and the American way, and; 2) he is a shrewd writer who knows how to make a buck. While I know the criminal rancher narrative is a closely circumscribed genre, the real life gangster-thugs he writes about bear some scrutiny. And so, I, the Grand Scrutinizer from planet Zappa, will provide a reader’s guide to the connection between the Spahn Ranch in California, and the Crawford Ranch in Texas. Yeeeehaaaaaaaa!

Bugliosi’s new book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”(2008), No.14 on the New York Times best-seller list, with very little fanfare, has already sold a whopping 130,000 copies hard cover. The book presents a legal case for why Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said, “130,00 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything.” Bugliosi’s explanation for why this best-seller is not being talked about is this: “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left”(NYT 7/7/08).

Maybe the media, paper and electronic, think W.s lame-duck status is reason to discount those who see him as a criminal. The mistake in this is that it ignores the possibility of him doing any further damage, specifically, attacking Iran. But it is at our peril that we discount credible sources, like Seymour Hersh, who warn that Bush will be dangerous right up to 11:59:59 of the day he leaves office. Hersh’s recent article in the July 7 New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield,” quotes Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was head of the U.S. Central Command in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying, “There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option.”

In an ironic turn, Bugliosi’s book coincides with the release of an HBO documentary, “Polanski: Wanted and Desired”(2008), that briefly touches upon the witch-hunt inflicted on Polanski in the wake of the Manson murders. Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was one of seven victims of perhaps the most sensational cult murders of the late Twentieth Century. Bugliosi’s, “Helter Skelter”(1971) provides an inside view of the Manson case, and was later made into a fairly accurate movie version starring Steve Railsback as Charlie Manson.

Less well known is the fact there were two accomplices with the initials G.B. and D.C. that accompanied the killers on that fateful August night in 1969. The mysterious D.C. was hot for Lynn “Squeaky” Fromme, and his sidekick, G.B., quickly followed suit by seducing Susan "Sadie" Atkins. Squeaky would later try to assassinate Ronny “Trickle Down” Reagan (a nick-name given him by Nancy) for trying to discourage D.C. from pursuing her. It was no accident the killers wrote “Death to Pigs” on the walls of the Polanski home in Benedict Canyon. Much of the confusion surrounding the murders has to do with the identity of one of the killers, Tex Watson. In the original testimony by Bobby Beausoleil, there was no mention of a last name, only “Tex.” It would be years later that this mysterious “Tex” was given a last name.

Noted conspiracy expert, Ollie Rock, has contended the “Death to Pigs” graffiti was meant as a ruse to suggest a left-wing bent to the killers’ motives. When asked who he was and what he was doing there, “Tex” told Wojtek Frykowski, one of the victims, "I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” Again, the substitution of the last name Watson, Son of Wat (Wat being an ancient Baragan name for the anti-christ, a shortened bastardization of the avenging satanic arch-angel, What?), is consistent with G.B.s later affiliations with evangelical necro-mancers who allegedly accepted his soul in exchange for installing him as a future World Potentate. D.C.s painting “pig” in blood on the front door, has been interpreted as a sublimated desire to menstruate on the world. It has long been speculated that D.C. was a paraphiliac who took pleasure in spraying older Mourning Dove hunters with birdshot.Years later, a black light illumination of the door revealed an anagramatic invisible text that praised Cthulu, and offered this chilling prophecy, Q-ranicrawbarinapathonimicon.

Another infamous conspiracy expert, Flash Limpblah, has compiled an exhaustive collection of anecdotal evidence that it was D.C., and not Manson, who coined the phrase, “Helter Skelter,” a term he took from the Beatles song of the same name and construed as an apocalyptic clash of cultures (Christian and Islamic) that the murders were intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked Manson, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the macabre.

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told G.B. and D.C. to "leave a sign… something witchy"; now, using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, D.C. wrote "pig" on the house’s front door, in Tate's blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.

This was the last anyone heard of the G.B./D.C. connection to the Manson murders. Rock has speculated they dissappeared into an obscure Indian Reservation in the mountains of Michigan’s western upper penninsula, where they studied archaic Baragan scripture and lived on Pabst, smoked fish, and Trenary Toast, before emerging in the new millenium to wreak havoc on an already declining American Imperial State.