I was quite outraged the other week to hear that Charles Manson has been released from prison. Even though he is in his eighties the guy, last I checked, is absolutely unrepentant. It’s only a matter of time, I fear, before he sets about putting his infamous cult back together, happy that there is still no shortage of outcasts and losers to continue his campaign to bring about Helter Skelter, his apocalyptic race war.

“They released him because he died,” someone clarified to me.
“Oh. Very good then. Carry on.”

And there you have it. Old Charlie was the world’s most infamous serial killer who never actually killed anybody, depending on how you look at it. He got young acid-heads to do his work for him, which is pejoratively impressive, yet impressive just the same. Most people can’t even get somebody stoned on acid to move over on the couch so they can sit down. Forget about ordering them to pile into a van, drive to the Hollywood Hills, scale a fence, murder a bunch of people, scrawl words on the walls in blood, get back into the van, avoid the Jefferson Airplane concert at the Whiskey A Go-Go, and find their way back to Spahn Ranch. Charlie was eloquent and charismatic and ultimately dumb. To bring about a race war there was no need to go murdering wealthy white people. He could’ve just instructed his followers to secretly, in the dead of night, remove all the Confederate statues from Virginia to Louisiana, leaving a note at each site saying, “You white motherfuckers have held us down long enough.” Done and done.

America back then would’ve looked like Syria today.

His failure is our gain, and yesterday’s pig is today’s sausage patty. We can be grateful that the internet wasn’t invented back in the late sixties, or Manson’s story could’ve ended quite differently. Instead of a few dirty wanderers laying around the California desert Manson could’ve had a worldwide legion of acolytes, like ISIS, appearing in digital form in every corner of the globe to tell people to hack everything to pieces. Disaster averted, for the time being.

Speaking of disasters, I was watching a video the other day of a robot doing a backwards somersault. Some jokers from Boston Dynamics created a cyborg that can do a standing backflip. When asked why, they released a statement saying, “We just wanted to create a computer that can do what humans do.” Hilarious.

Fair enough, although I know very few humans who can actually pull off a standing backflip and land on anything else but their head. If they really wanted to create a robot that does what humans do they could’ve created a robot that sits in a recliner and then they could’ve created another robot to fetch beers for the first robot while answering questions about what the weather is going to be later on and what time the game starts and who is that hot actress that is on that show that I like?

My fear of the backflipping robot was quickly overshadowed by a video of another robot. Her name is “Poppy” and she isn’t a robot but might as well be one. She is a teenage girl who, like Charles Manson, tries to get people to fall under her spell, except she does it through a series of YouTube videos. This is the next iteration of the Manson family. Poppy will probably be killing people in a few years, either directly with a knife or indirectly with bad art. Her leader is a fellow named Titanic Sinclair. Like the rocker Marilyn Manson, whose criteria for nomenclature in his band is to have the first name of a glamour icon and the last name of a serial killer, Titanic Sinclair seems to have arrived at his name by adopting the first name of a historic shipwreck and the last name of a muckraking writer.

Titanic Sinclair’s “Poppy” campaign is to sell ironic jailbait, cute girl, vapid sugar pop music, which is the same thing as normal jailbait, cute girl, sugar pop music, except that
old guys who watch “Poppy” videos can masturbate to it without all the guilt, because the videos are made with a hip self-awareness of how ridiculous the genre is, which makes all the difference.

Charles Manson was born “No Name Maddox.” His notorious identity came about some years later, cobbled together from this and that. So in a way he himself was an invention. Then again most famous people we recognize are invented. Who doesn’t love Issur Demsky. Allan Konigsberg. Robert Zimmerman. Farrokh Bulsara. Frances Gumm, and Marion Morrison. (Kirk Douglas. Woody Allen. Bob Dylan. Freddie Mercury. Judy Garland. John Wayne.)

Fuck it, I’m sold. I’m joining Titanic Sinclair’s cult. No more Paddy the Duke. I’m going to have to figure this out…okay, boat wreck. muckraker.
My name is now Lusitania Algren. Please to meet everybody!
More Alembics to come.