Casting call

Charles Manson before he was cool

Mark Steyn writes,

Failed singer/songwriter Charles Manson died yesterday, in prison at the age of 83. Showbiz-wise, he couldn't get arrested ...until he got arrested. But slaughtering Sharon Tate et al gave him enormous pop culture influence: Marilyn Manson and Spahn Ranch are among the performers who took their stage names from him and his cult. The BBC calculated a few years back that there are over 70 European bands who play his "songs". Back in the Nineties, I was with Martin Charnin, lyricist of Annie, who'd heard a rumor that Manson was about to release, from his gaol cell, a Christmas album. "Slay Ride?" I suggested.

But, as I remarked glumly on "Fox & Friends" the other morning, the big bucks are when you do the joke for real. The left's glamorization of violence is a cliché because it's real - because all over the western world dweeby, spindly, trustie-fundie varsity youth who couldn't shoot up a liquor store or cut it in MS-13 instead get turned on by political violence. As upper-middle-class suburban cheerleader Bernadine Dohrn crowed to a crowd of 400 "activists" about three months after the Manson murders:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate's stomach! Wild!

The crowd then adopted a fork-style hand gesture as a symbol of solidarity.

Oh, but surely Miss Dohrn was only a misguided child ...pushing thirty. Or a decade older than the young men who liberated Europe two years after she was born.

Miss Dohrn retired a couple of years ago as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her husband is Bill Ayers, mentor to and patron of the 44th President of the United States.

~Speaking of degrees of separation, "the pig Tate" (in Professor Dohrn's words) was the wife of Roman Polanski. The stomach her killers "shoved a fork into" was the belly of a woman two weeks away from giving birth. If one seeks mitigating factors for the full-throated support Hollywood gave Polanski in his subsequent incarnation as child rapist, the loss he suffered that night in 1969 was profound and grievous. One cannot plead the same for the now daily churn from Hollywood's soiled and sagging "casting couch". Polanski was a supposed "father figure" to one of today's biggest directors, Brett Ratner:

Keri Claussen Khalighi was a 17-year-old fashion model from a farm town in Nebraska when she met Brett Ratner and Russell Simmons at a casting call.

Ratner was an up-and-coming music video director and a protege of Simmons, the Def Jam Recordings mogul. They took Khalighi to dinner one night in 1991 at Mr. Chow in New York, and then back to Simmons' apartment to show her a music video they'd been working on.

Quickly, Simmons began making aggressive sexual advances, yanking off her clothes, Khalighi said.

"I looked over at Brett and said 'help me' and I'll never forget the look on his face," she recalled. "In that moment, the realization fell on me that they were in it together."

Khalighi said that Simmons, who was then about twice her age, tried to force her to have intercourse. "I fought it wildly," she said. He eventually relented and coerced her to perform oral sex, she alleged. "I guess I just acquiesced."

Ratner, meanwhile, "just sat there and watched," she said.

Feeling "disgusting," Khalighi said she went to take a shower. Minutes later, she alleged, Simmons walked up behind her in the shower and briefly penetrated her without her consent. She said she jerked away, then he left. "It hurt so much."

She was just seventeen. But at least Roy Moore never called up her mother to ask if he could meet her at the shopping mall for a chocolate malt.

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