A Western Tale

Thomas Paine’s Corner

By Vi Ransel

1/13/09

Almost all of Charlie’s immediate family was rounded up by home invaders, tortured and killed in their own living room: mama and papa, the teenage twins, little Joan and baby Beth. (His younger brother, Sonny, survived.) While this vicious gang was at work, they dipped their hands in Charlie’s family’s blood and splattered obscene and racist phrases all over the walls of the slaughter chamber. Death to the Mann Family. Manns to gas chambers. Manns are fuckin’ cockroaches.

It hadn’t come as a complete surprise. Someone, probably the home invaders, had been harassing the Manns for months with phone hang ups, then luridly whispered threats to get out of the neighborhood. Their mailbox was battered to bits and their dogs were poisoned. “Niggers” was written in gasoline on their front lawn, so the word showed up later when the grass died. Charlie’s family wasn’t Black. The last of these incidents ended with the breaking of all the glass in the breezeway during a night of screaming destruction. And when the police arrived, after a six-hour wait, they said there were no clues as to who’d done it.

Others in Charlie’s family had been subject to the same sort of harassment, most notably his father’s parents, three of his uncles and his sister and her husband. The rest of Charlie’s large family, another set of grandparents, seven aunts, eight uncles and their families, had been victims of somewhat less hateful torment. It seemed to Charlie that it was only his family that was being singled out. And, as always, the police denied being able to find any clues.

Charlie saw all the clues, and was convinced that the police were, if not related to the criminals, at least their very fast friends. The evidence pointed to the Fellows family, who’d had it in for Charlie’s father’s father since the Depression, when he bought THEIR grandfather’s house and real estate business at the bank’s auction – fair and square. The Fellows had never forgiven them. And Charlie’s grandfather had been living in that very same house today.

When the home invaders had finished with Charlie’s family, they went to his grandfather’s house. Yes. THAT house. And to those of three of his uncles. And to his sister’s. All on the same night. And repeated their atrocities, raping his sister in front of her husband and children, and forcing his grandma to play the piano while his poor, arthritic grandfather danced naked for them as they laughed and prodded his penis with the fireplace tongs. Charlie knew this because his grandmother had somehow managed to survive that night, as his younger brother Sonny and his Uncle Zee. Grandma died on the way to the hospital. It took the ambulance a VERY long time to arrive.

The rest of Charlie’s relatives didn’t want to keep living in a community that had produced such an atrocity, let alone not investigated it honestly and completely. And some of them were made an offer they could hardly refuse. Anonymously, of course. Move. Or else. But then again, of course, there’d be help. There’d even be trucks to pick them up and move them out. And in a softer version of the invitation, they were given their first choice of destinations – one of the communities under the control of the Fellows family’s revived real estate business in the Emmy region, where some of the Mann’s relatives were already living. They’d be able emigrate and set up a safe, secure place they could call their own. Out of the Fellow’s family’s sight. They wouldn’t even have to pack. Until the murder scenes were cleaned up, the Fellows would keep all of their belongings, as well as their houses, until they could be sold. Then the Fellows would send them the money. “Yeah, right,” thought Charlie.

At this time, Charlie also became better acquainted with his Uncle Zee’s friends. And they introduced him to THEIR friend, Mr. Simpson, who while reviled by the Fellows family and their friends and neighbors, had achieved a perverse sort of success in selling illegal weapons to anyone with the money to pay for them. And just to show what a humanitarian he was, he even sold those weapons on credit, but with interest so high that most of his credit customers wound up with broken legs. Or worse. With their throats slashed ear-to-ear, heads dangling, as an example.

As Charlie bought a handgun, he told Mr. Simpson that the Fellows community was shipping him and his whole family wholesale to Emmy, where they’d have a place of their own. Mr. Simpson grinned and placed an M-16 in Charlie’s hands, saying “There’s more where that came from.” And it was at that point Uncle Zee changed the family name to Manson.

Mr. Simpson knew the “new” community well because he’d wanted to sell some of his merchandise there, but the Fellows claimed it was their turf, and it was surrounded on all sides by his well-armed rivals. And to Charlie he said “Kid, I believe what we have here is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

When Charlie, his Uncle Zee and his younger brother Sonny arrived in Emmy, along with the rest of the Mann family survivors, Sonny was shocked to find so many people already there. But Uncle Zee and his friends, and now Charlie, didn’t care. Nobody listened to Sonny. He was just a naive kid. And besides, the people there were Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies who were under the foot of the Fellows anyway.

So this was where the Manson family began to establish their new community. And they used any guilt/humanity the Fellows family might still have at the bottoms of their teeny, tiny hearts to maneuver them into helping them to do it. And of course there was the friendly Mr. Simpson, with an agenda all his own.

And in many stunning and macho acts of hypocrisy – or so it seemed to Sonny –

Charlie, Uncle Zee and the rest of the Manson family proceeded to clean up. They told the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies they’d have to vacate their land and their homes, no ifs, ands or buts – or else. That led to more than a little resistance on the part of the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies, but since they only had BB guns and 22s and Mr. Simpson had supplied the Mansons with machine guns, grenades and rockets launchers, it wasn’t too much of a problem.

They started taking over real estate right and left. More than the Fellows had promised them when they craftily got rid of the Mansons by pretending a humanitarian concern for their safety. And when the Fellows protested that the Mansons were going too far, the Mansons blew up one of the Fellows’ hotels, where they were having a real estate dealers’ convention and killed 91 of them, just to make their point. The Mansons kept up their terrorism against the Fellows family, as well as their efforts to (1) convince the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies to vacate to surrounding communities – who weren’t all that hot to have them, even though they were related; to (2)acknowledge that the Mansons had the right to run Emmy and submit; or to (3)be slaughtered. And the Mansons had the fire power to do it.

The Fellows family eventually had enough and decided “Who gives a shit? It’s just a dusty desert full of Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies anyway. Let them have it.” Besides, most of the rest of the surrounding neighborhoods, and even those pretty far away were convinced the Mansons were the victims here and the Fellows didn’t like being called prejudiced. It cost them money. They left the Mansons to fight it out with the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies, who didn’t intend to give up their homes and farms without a fight. And while a lot of them became refugees, running to their relatives’ communities, not to mention being rounded up, put on trucks and transferred there by the Mansons, many more were simply slaughtered. But what was left of them, dug in their heels.

The Mansons’ plan, actually Uncle Zee’s and his friends’ plan, was to simply erase the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies from the face of the earth, though at first those who accepted the Mansons’ terms were allowed to stay put. But the Mansons saw them as an ever present potential threat, since the Mansons themselves knew how they felt about the Fellows, and being beaten, raped, murdered and transferred. And there were a LOT more Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies than there were Mansons, although the Mansons were MUCH more heavily armed. Remember Mr. Simpson? And they had the implicit backing of the Fellows, who could be counted on to more or less give the Mansons whatever they wanted, not just out of belated contrition, but financial interest. (No one wanted to do business with the family who had mass-murdered the Manns.)

The Mansons began to demolish not just the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies’ individual houses, but entire rural communities, along with their gardens and orchards. They slaughtered the people, along with the farm animals, down to the very last terrorist chicken, or else put the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies on trucks and transported them to the border. At the same time they built Manson settlements on the still-smoldering ruins, changing their names from Rainbow, Moon Beam, Reefer and Commune to those with Manson family associations.

They not only demolished entire communities and rebuilt them as Manson communities, they chased the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies right into the refugee camps where they’d deposited their asses and slaughtered some more of them, since some of the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippie kids were shooting into the new settlements with their BB guns, and most likely planning a massive resistance.

After a few years, Sonny was finding hard to look in the mirror. But like I said, nobody listened to Sonny. And the Manson family decided they didn’t have enough real estate between them and the refugees to feel truly safe. They were going to need a buffer zone between them and the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies, even if it had to be carved out of the communities that had so unwillingly accepted the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies in the first place. So they went to war. And when they were through wiping them up with their overwhelming fire power, they took a couple new pieces of real estate, West River and Gee Town, from the surrounding communities. Now these communities weren’t too happy, but by this time Mr. Simpson had supplied the Mansons with some pretty nasty weapons, so the surrounding communities didn’t do much but whine and complain. They couldn’t. They were outgunned.

At this point Charlie and his family were about as welcome in most of Emmy as a convention of maggots in a meat market. Uncle Zee and his friends had moved right into the neighborhoods where the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies lived. Some of the houses were beautiful – after you got rid of the vermin living in them and fumigated, of course. And besides, the point was to outnumber them. They’d just beat them up – at gunpoint – throw them out and move in. And if the ones still alive wouldn’t leave the neighborhood on their own, the Mansons WERE white enough to put them on trucks and transfer their asses to the border.

It was important to contain the bomb threat – the population bomb – since all the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies wanted to do was make love, not war and outbreed the Manson family, who, after all, liked to let the surrounding communities know that the Mansons did things democratically. In fact, they were the only freedom and democracy-loving people in Emmy. And to prove it, they’d have to be a majority.

Eventually Uncle Zee’s friends were running everything, even the few people who agreed with Sonny, as well as West River and Gee Town, where most of the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies had “relocated”. But there was still a shitload of the cockroaches right inside the Manson’s neighborhood itself, whining and complaining about their rights. And the sons of bitches, especially in Gee Town, actually expected food, water, electricity, schools, the whole enchilada. And they kept shooting their damned BB guns and 22s across the damn border. A couple of Uncle Zee’s friends had actually been injured or killed. What was up with that? Ungrateful bastards!

To calm them down, Uncle Zee made sure all his friends moved out of Gee Town, but the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies STILL weren’t happy. They didn’t like the barbed wire the Mansons had installed around Gee Town for the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies own protection. Or the humane way the Mansons monitored everything that moved in or out of Gee Town to make sure nobody was smuggling in something the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies could hurt themselves with. That would mean Uncle Zee and his friends would just have to go back in and hurt somebody while they were trying to protect the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies from the ones with the smuggled weapons.

And on the population bomb front, things got so bad that the Mansons had to pass an ordinance to keep the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies from marrying into the family and polluting the bloodline. And any Manson who would be a party to this mongrelizing just HAD to be one of Sonny’s friends.

Sonny was so upset his hair was falling out. He’d started writing for a local newspaper, setting down what was going on. But he couldn’t get any papers outside the neighborhood to publish the stuff. They just couldn’t believe the Mansons would do anything like that. And if they did, they had a good reason for it. They had to defend themselves. And the people in the neighborhood? Nobody listened to Sonny. Even when he wrote that the Mansons were starting to remind him of the home invaders who killed his family before they made the move to Emmy. And that Uncle Zee and his friends had completely taken over Charlie and the rest of the family’s way of thinking.

Besides, unlike Gee Town, West River was getting with the program. Uncle Zee’s friends had been able to pick up some prime real estate over there. And the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies who lived there had set up a separate (but, of course, equal) neighborhood association of their own. And under the protection of Uncle Zee’s friends, they were in complete agreement with the Mansons. They were paid to be.

The Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies in the Mansons’ neighborhood were behaving their asses. They had to. They were surrounded on all sides. Anywhere they had a neighborhood, the Zees moved in and took the best real estate and tried like hell to create a Zee majority.

But it was then that the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies in Gee Town decided to elect their own community board and things got REALLY ugly. They voted in the damned GANG that had been taking the potshots across the border. They were really bad shots and almost nobody on the Zee side got hit, but they needed to be taught a lesson. Just who the fuck did they think they were?!!

The Mansons were really going to have to crack down. They stopped shipments of food and medicine and cut off the electricity. But even when they had them locked down tight, they were too stupid to just give up and do what the Mansons had asked for so very reasonably. It was like grade school with these cockroaches. Either give up the bad guys or we’ll have to punish all of you ’til you do. What part of that didn’t they get?!! And there were so many of the freakin’ bastards packed so tight into Gee Town, that it was too dangerous for Uncle Zee and his friends to go in on foot and clean the rats’ nest out.

By this time Sonny’s editorials were getting all psycho, psychological, that is. He said it had gotten to the point where those who weren’t part of the family weren’t even treated like people. That it was as if the Zees thought the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies were subhuman, and that the Zees were superhuman and acted with impunity under the cloak of the Fellows’ never-ending guilt and a blanket of Mr. Simpson’s lethal weapons. That the victims had become the aggressors. And then Charlie and Uncle Zee came to put Sonny in jail.

Uncle Zee let it be known that Zees had the right to defend themselves. That the Fellows had promised them this property – fair and square – in compensation for their suffering. That they didn’t have to take being abused and murdered by any Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies.

And Mr. Simpson showed up in person. He made sure the Mansons had enough fighter planes and bombs to keep their hands clean – and safe – while they softened up Gee Town enough to begin to implement the plans they’d been making ever since they moved in.

But even then, the Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies just wouldn’t give up. They wouldn’t just lay down and die. No. They had to go shooting off their BB guns and 22s. But then again, that was just what Uncle Zee wanted. He needed a reason to put the rest of the plan into effect.

So in order to protect the Mansons, he would be FORCED to get some even more exotic deterrents from Mr. Simpson: chemicals; DIMES; GBU 39s; cluster bombs; DU; and Willy Pete. He had to get tanks and helicopters and remote control drones. Those Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies were tenacious bastards. They just wouldn’t stop shooting at the Mansons with those deadly BB guns and 22s.

It was then Uncle Zee and the rest of the Zees knew that they could take action on the last part of their long-awaited plan. They were going to give it a test run in Gee Town first. They were goin’ in. On the ground. To take out those goddamned Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies and their guns one by one with every Zee in Emmy. And then on to those in the surrounding communities. It was time to get rid of the Dirty Mother Fuckin’ Hippies once and for all.

And in case I didn’t make myself clear, the “cast” includes –

The Manns as the Jews of Europe

The Fellas as the British and the Germans

Charlie as mainstream Jews-cum-Israelis

Uncle Zee and his friends as the Zionists

Sonny as the truth-telling Israeli Jews and journalists

Mr. Simpson as the United States

and

The Dirty Fuckin’ Hippies as the Palestinians and Arabs

Emmy stands in for the Middle East, as does West River
for the West Bank and Gee town for Gaza.

Poet and part-time actor Viola Ransel is a Senior Contributing Editor with CJO.

To further your sociopolitical education, strengthen your connection with the radical community, and deepen your participation in forming an egalitarian, just, ecological, non-speciesist and democratic society, visit the Transformative Studies Institute at http://transformativestudies.org/ and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies at http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/.

Source: Thomas Paine’s Corner