5.5 minutes with a mad man

Never let this man out of prison

I live where there’s no tv, there’s no radio, there’s no clocks, there’s no electric lights.  The girls carry water, they don’t wear makeup.  They have their babies by themselves.  They go in the shack and squat down and have their babies lying on the ground, lying on the earth.

I don’t live.  I lived in Hollywood.  And I had all that.  The Rolls-Royce and Ferrari and the pad in Beverly Hills.  I had the surfboard and The Beach Boys and ? and Neil Diamond and  Rob Scott and Jimmy Griffen, Elvis Presley and Wesley Bestleys and all them guys.  The Dean Martin’s and the Nancy Sinatra’s and all the ?

“Will you do it to me?  I hear you’ll do it good and all that kind when you come up to my house later?”

So and I went through all that and seen that was a bigger prison then the one I just got out of.  And I really didn’t care to go back to prison.  Prison doesn’t begin and end at the gate.  Prison’s in your mind.  It’s locked in one world that’s dead and dying, or it’s open to a world that’s free and alive.  Drugs, LSD. I don’t consider it a drug.  I don’t consider peyote a drug.  Those are more or less religiously significant: awareness, mind expanding apparatuses that come from the intelligence of the universe.

The reason that the girls liked me was “Hey now! Hey now!  I’m all around you!  Round you.  Hey now up on your heart I can see through you.” (sung) And I played and I sing and they say, “Hey man, you, you got soul  you got soul in that music!  And I said, “Yeah, I play a little bit. I like music.”  And they said, “Man, You’re really somebody!”   And I said, “Oh I am?  I just got out of jail.  I don’t know what somebody is.”  They liked my music. They say, “Man, we want to get you over.”  I said, “Get me over for what?”  We’ll take you down here to Beverly Hills and we want to get you in cause you’re a star.I said, “I’m a what?”  They said, “You’re a star!”  So they took me to The Beach Boys and I went and I got on a surfboard are rode around and I looked.  Jeez, Willy Jean, this is more trouble then what I just got out of.

Now look at yourself.  You got be aware of that.  Whether you like it or not, you got to do things.  You gotta get up and go through all kinds of changes.  Whether you want to or not doesn’t matter. Your whole life is put in your paycheck.  You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to do something I don’t want to do.  If I’m shoveling the barn you want me to go  (incomprehensible)  “No, no, no, I’m doing something here.  I’m helping this blind man.  I feel better in doing what I want to do.

I did not break the law.  Jesus Christ told you that two thousand years ago.  You don’t understand me.  That’s your trouble.  Not my fault because you don’t understand me.  I don’t understand you either.  But I don’t spend my whole life trying to put the blame over on you, because my cigarette didn’t light, or because something didn’t work right.  Why you want to call me a murderer for?  I never killed anyone.  I don’t need to kill anyone.  I think it.  I have it here.

I don’t need to live in this physical realm.   I walk around in the physical realm.  And I put on the faces and I talk and I play and yackty yack.  It’s just a big act, man.  In the spiritual world is where I live.  I exist in places you’d never even dreamed of.

You talk about, you know, this new physical realm you live in.  Guilty and is he in sin?  How’s your courts guilty?  How many people do you think you’ve hung on the ventilators and the nut wards and forced medication on them?  You see what I’m saying?  You don’t have any idea what the hell’s going on.

If you knew what the hell was going on in your own system, then you’d say, “Now I see what’s creating this. Society’s creating It.  Society’s saying we want these Rambos, we want these killers.  Oh wow man, look at that dude there.  And you got little kids looking in the book.  What are they selling?  In the Sear & Roebuck: Rambo for 12 to 15.  Ki Karate from age 5 to17.  See, you got all your kids out here doing these crazy things now you want to come and say “Charlie Manson is the father of our country. We’re convicting you for being Jesus Christ.  We’re convicting you for being the devil.  We’re convicting you for being responsible for our actions.”

I’m not responsible for anyone’s actions but my own actions.  In my whole life, I have burglarized the grocery store, stole some nickels and dimes, busted open a stamp machine, stolen a few automobiles, and cashed a couple checks.  I’m a petty car thief.

I’ve… been with prostitutes and bums and minors all my life.  The street is my world.

I don’t pretend to go uptown or be anything fancy.  I can, but I find more real in the world that I’m in than I do the tinsel and the real world is what I have to deal with everyday.

Ah, believe me, if I started murdering people, there’d be none of you left.

~Charles Manson, live with Ban Abrams on MSNBC