"The evidence I’d amassed against the official version of the Manson murders was so voluminous, from so many angles, that it was overdetermined. I could poke a thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it? There was no way."
This quote from the final chapter of "Chaos" summarizes the results of the effort that was made to dispel the lies and get to the truth behind a narrative that became simple fact - the narrative that was told about a crime with supposedly no mystery left in it, or as The Guardian put it: "There are no questions about what happened… We know pretty much exactly who did what to whom, when and why."
The book, titled "CHAOS" is supposedly named after the covert CIA operation, among the many disparate, wild, yet alarmingly very real efforts by American intelligence targeting American civilians. But rather I think the other meaning of the word, "Chaos", disorder, is the more appropriate interpretation of the title. The book itself is almost an exercise in semiotics - there is a series of signs, of clues, we're trying to set in a meaningful pattern to figure out what actually happened in the unmediated reality, one not curated and shaped by narratives we are told, and narratives we tell ourselves, only to fail and realize we'll never know the truth, the meaning of the clues, or if they have any meaning or significance at all beyond what we wish for them to signify. It is, in this manner, really reminding me of "The Name of the Rose", in which we follow a mystery, seemingly one with a pattern, with a perpetrator, only to realize they were mostly accidental, at times only loosely related events (if even related at all) - a chaos of events we tried to tie together only for it all to fall apart, with so many loose ends that we thought meant something leading nowhere. Likewise, this book, O'Neill's research into the Manson murders pokes a remarkable amount of holes in the narrative we are told, one manufactured by the prosecutor in the trial - Vincent Bugliosi - and that became so entrenched that we treat it as a complete, flawless narrative when discussing this seminal event signaling the ending of an era. He displays all the seeming cover-ups, all the strange coincidences, all the convenient errors in declarations, he digs for an non-curated reality behind the simple story we know - but the overwhelming amount of holes, leading to wholly different directions and interpretations of what really happened, cannot all be true at once and the same time. The worrying degree of close ties between criminals, politicians, celebrities, law enforcement, intelligence, this complex web that's unfolding, is so disorderly, that there could be more or less the same amount of interpretations as to the chain events as there are connections between people we'd imagine aren't really in the same social circle, but are in fact actually very close. One of the takeaways I got from reading this is precisely this - just how all these elements are related - these supposedly different universes are very closely aligned, in fact, and the potential for any sort of cover-up for acquaintances, for corruption, for nepotism, is almost endless. The number of unethical practices by law enforcement revealed in this book is staggering. Another takeaway, one that is very disturbing, is just the degree of seeming autonomy and lack of oversight exists among "intelligence agencies" - whether it's the instigation of violence meant to harm left-wing groups or whether it's horrific brain-washing experiments on unwitting subjects, there is an entire "world", completely hidden from our senses, almost completely unreported about, that exists in the shadows of society - and that no one really seems to curtail. Right-wingers tend to talk about the "Deep State" - they are wrong in their assessment, but not about the existence of shadowy, unethical, elements in the political system, but rather where they place them and their allegiance (they claim, ridiculously enough, that they are "liberal", "progressive" or even most ludicrously "communist"). In reality such shadowy elements are probably among the most dangerous reactionary elements in the political system.
Perhaps it is alarming, but the sort of chaos we are presented with, the sort of chaos that actually occurred, all the holes in the narrative, it allows for some disturbing possibilities - some so disturbing we dismiss them simply because we sincerely don't want to acknowledge the possibility that they might not be figments of people's imaginations.
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