Charles Manson is gone and yet he’s still being given attention. This ‘Lassie’ parody on the Ben Stiller Show is just one of many that’s been kicked around, but at least Bob Odenkirk is fairly amusing in his role. The wild-haired, wild-eyed madman does little but spout gibberish and act like a nut but if you’ve watched even a minute of Manson’s many interviews you would know right away that Odenkirk is being truer to life than you would normally think. Manson was about as loony as a toon as the saying goes, and despite being able to get deep and dark he was still as comical as they get since his mood swings went from left right more regularly than clockwork. He’d actually convinced himself that he was this crazy and lived up to it throughout the remainder of his life.
The sketch is pretty simple, Manson’s playing the crazy dog of the family that can talk but is hard to understand. When little Timmy goes looking for frogs and finds a poisonous snake instead Manson has to rush back home and tell Timmy’s parents. Somehow, throughout all of gibberish, they divine the meaning and come to the conclusion that Timmy is in trouble. You know, I think the actual Lassie made more sense than this guy.
Obviously I’m talking about the real Manson vs. Odenkirk’s hilarious take on him, since the real Manson thought he was this scary, decidedly cryptic personality that could somehow slaughter the world if he only wanted to. The funny thing about people that make such strange claims is that at one point or another in life we’ve all wanted to lash out just a bit, if not a lot, and there might have even been a moment when we had the opportunity to do just this. But whether we took it or not we learned that there are consequences for our actions, and not just those that are enforced by the laws of the land. Manson seems to have thought he was above all that from the way he acted, and yet he went back to his cell each and every time after an interview to do whatever it was that he did.
Was he dangerous? Probably. Would he have killed anyone? Not likely, since if there’s one thing you learn in life from an early age it’s that talkers tend to do very little and doers don’t talk all that much since they’re too busy getting the job done. Whether Manson actually killed people or not isn’t much an important debate any longer. It’s the fact that thanks to his silver tongue and somehow mesmerizing ideas he was able to convince others to do his bidding and even more to contend that he was one of the most dangerous men in the world.
In truth he was a disturbed individual that overestimated his own worth and his own power base. It’s far too easy to manipulate those that are looking for something or someone to guide their life. That’s not called intelligence or wisdom, it’s called opportunistic manipulation.
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