Charles Manson croaked it today and National Public radio, my go-to source for what is usually pretty good journalism, spent what seemed like forever explaining the significance of his passing. Come on, NPR. Is there anyone anywhere in America who doesn’t know why Charles Manson has been in prison since the dawn of time? And if somehow someone somewhere managed to live this long without knowing all, or even any of the gory details about this particularly reprehensible human being, are you really doing them a favor by telling them about it now?
Honestly, I’d rather I didn’t know. Manson was just another sick, twisted waste of a human being. Examining him yet again won’t make any difference to anybody. “But he was sooo charismatic,” the news reports say, which is just another way of saying that he was not only good at finding people stupid enough to listen to him, he lacked the moral fortitude that prevents most of us from urging others to do really sick shit.
Giving a psychopath like Manson more than ten seconds of air time to note his passing is as disturbing as when major news outlets devote endless hours to broadcasting every little personal detail of our current crop of mass murderers. I have no idea whether or not the killers sought that kind of fame, and frankly I don’t care. If nobody’s going to do anything about stopping killers like these, I can’t see what good it does to broadcast the details of their lives.
This Is Drivel 