Stanton LaVey

My first blog entry, although published on June 22^nd, was written a week or so earlier in preparation for the new site launch.

I’m only mentioning this because I referenced George Carlin in a short list of people who have risked it all to be champions of truth. When I learned of Carlin’s passing, I had only just published the blog. Then it began to sink in deeper with the realization of how few real legends are left.

I was raised in the company and care of some of the most influential people in art, music, and literature today: my Grandfather, of course, Kenneth Anger, Joe Coleman, Adam Parfrey, Boyd Rice to name just a few. The human race is at a crossroad in the evolutionary chain. Do we clean house now during a time when there are fewer heroes and legends alive than anytime in the past 200+ years? Or do we continue on this path paved in self deceit, caked with bullshit and awash with human blood from thousands of years of murder in the name of God and Gold?

If we don’t make the change soon, it will be too late, if it isn’t already. Of the hundred or so people I associate with on a regular basis, only ONE of them has a child. One baby for every 100 hard working, intelligent people!?! This fact is one of many not so subtle indications that the future, unless it is radically diverted now, will become the magnified version of what it is already; a world of blind slaves ruled by greedy murderers who’s inferior intelligence & dependency on wealth and power have influenced their will to eradicate intelligent, independent, forward thinking people from existence. Conformity and stupidity are rewarded more and more. Wide spread depravity and checkout-line tabloid journalism keeps fueling the fickle tastes of the people who have given in to these capitalist tactics, all set up by big corrupt corporations and even more corrupt governments. We’re not living in a democracy. If not for the Constitution, we would all be fucked.

What would Ben Franklin say about the condition of our country if he could be here to witness it? The United States of America is totalitarian, as well as communistic. I call America “Communist Hills” because the only real difference is there is more crap to buy, malls to graze in, and a slightly more developed illusion of domestication. Warhol was right after all. As art and culture seem to be evaporating into the ether, so are it’s representatives: celebrities. With the help of the internet, the world is rapidly embracing the relatively new religion of celebrity worship. And I’m not talking about hero worship, because most of the celebrities of now are not and will never be legends. Most of them are masochists who have traded any piece of mind, or sense of self, for money. Most celebrities today have literally sold their soul to the devil; not the character of the devil but the true evil that is the media.

With things like MySpace, anyone can create the façade of personality, imagination, creativity, and talent. With the help of html code, Photoshop, and shameless self-absorption, it is becoming more difficult all the time to discern what is actual talent or just good acting. People have actually become celebrities this very way, granted they are the first of the 15-minuters.

I often fantasize what it would be like if the internet just stopped working one morning, and didn’t begin working for even just a week, or a month. Sometimes I daydream about how extreme a social experiment that would actually be. I believe it would inspire a mild state of anarchy, maybe not so mild. I think people would react worse to that than the loss of John Lennon, JFK & Martin Luther King combined. It might even incite wars. Same thing goes for the TV. All of these modern distractions are tools being used to keep us in line, it’s hard to realize you’re being policed by your TV and computer because it doesn’t wear a badge and gun and treat you like shit (unless you’re using a PC, they can be pretty brutal.)

It’s all very ‘1984‘ - Orwell was right. The twist is that instead of them investing time, money and resources watching us, which they do minimally, it’s not like in the movies where people are being tracked and monitored, the manpower necessary to facilitate that kind of authority would be far to difficult to manage and impossible to hide. In other words, if it were done the 1984 way, we’d be considered by the rest of the world to be a fascist dictatorship. TV and the internet produces the same amount of authority and control, instead of big brother watching us, they figured out how to make us watch him. Here’s the real kicker: they are making money monitoring us instead of spending money to have us monitored by other humans.

Machines don’t have families, 401K, health coverage, or sick leave. They don’t need to take breaks and they’re never drunk on the job. It is absolutely genius. It can be traced back to the newsreels played before movies during WW1 & WW2; we learned that we could manipulate the public with false information, anti-enemy propaganda. Movies were being made on this same premise - for the sole purpose of molding our opinions in the form of ‘entertainment’. Realizing how effective a form of mass manipulation newspapers and newsreels were, the next step was to get this misinformation into as many homes as possible and disguise it as entertainment and family pastime. Over the past 50+ years TV has been developed and fine-tuned to serve it’s true purpose – keeping us in line, distracted, glued to our seat… and completely misinformed.

The internet is it’s new and improved version of it’s predecessor the TV. Information online is even more bunk than what TV dishes out. Wikipedia is one of, if not the worst website, on the net. For starters, the founder of Wikipedia has reserved the right to refuse service to me, that’s right, anyone can have a Wikipedia page, but for whatever reason – and I know it’s not the reason they gave which is that I’m not ‘noteworthy’, I’m not allowed. I’m probably better off not being on it. That website is a forum for absolutely anyone to take a crack at rewriting history. I would not be at all surprised if that site either gets sued and removed from the net, or will be forced by court order to only host information provided by verifiable authorities. Wikipedia isn’t a bad starting point for research, I use it to find related names and terms but beyond that the misinfo they are hosting is extremely subjective, and too often false.

It surprises people when they learn that I never watch TV, news, read newspapers, or magazines. I don’t play video games, or listen to the radio. I read very little, as you can probably tell by my drop-out grammar. I just refuse to believe any of it. I love watching great films though, and even though art inspired language, communication and media, I don’t blame art. Art didn’t do all of this - people did all of this. It’s like ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ - same principle. The only TV I like is old sitcoms because they are borderline slapstick and depending on the show, it can really be just for entertainment. It can’t all be bad or else people wouldn’t tune in at all. But I remember growing up and watching Benny Hill, The Three Stooges, The Addams Family and every now and then I’d catch a Carlin show. He was like Lenny Bruce & Richard Pryor combined. His position on god, religion, humanity, government - there was no denying it - he was one of the greatest, smartest, most deservingly successful, and most courageous Satanists there ever will be. He may not have considered himself a Satanist, if I recall I think he was an atheist, but with all due respect, he sure seemed like the real McCoy to me.

With the way the media treats celebrity, I hate to say it but I’m very pessimistic for the future. Our heroes are leaving us and for each generation there are fewer great thinkers to carry these great torches left behind by the last of the best. Carlin’s contributions are timeless and will forever challenge the people who read, listen, or watch him to dare to consider truths that have been strategically covered up for ages by state and religion. There’s no separation there - they justify each other and serve important purposes.

Another analogy - the guy that owns a Chevron on one side of the street and a 76 right across the street. Asking less at one guarantees him the sale – he wins either way. See, the government doesn’t care if it’s the church & god keeping people in line. And the church is perfectly happy to have George W throwing the God word in every other sentence. They are working together and have been for a very long time, but people are getting fed up with Bush & the bible because you don’t have to be very smart to know it is all bullshit, dictatorship and intimidation. Fear is god and Bush knows that very well. So does the Pope. And why wouldn’t they have faith in their god? He works for them every day.

On Friday the 13^th Traci Michaelz (Drummer / Peppermint Creeps) died unexpectedly, he was only 34. I met Traci through a mutual friend, Lexa Vonn and I loved him right off the bat. There are very few people in this world who you just can’t help but love, he was one of these rarest of breeds. I got to hang with him a handful of times and had some really fun phone exchanges with him. He was a good looking, flamboyant, talented and determined local legend here in Hollywood. Everyone knew Traci, if you didn’t know Traci, you were either new to town or not part of ‘the family’ of freaks, goths, metal heads, and party animals. He was simply an amazing guy; truly one of a kind, and he will be missed by anyone who even met him for 5 minutes.

I went to Traci’s funeral service at Hollywood Forever Cemetery last Friday and it was very powerful. The first thing I noticed was how much of a mix of different looking people where in attendance, all of them freaks in their own right. But then it started sinking in, I was looking around at this congregation of people and I got the sense that if you were able to take all of these people and put them into one person, it would be Traci – and that he left a part of himself in all of us there that day. He will be missed and remembered forever.

After the funeral I ran into my friend Tanya, who incidentally did prison time & developed a long standing friendship with Susan Atkins, who informed me that Atkins is dying of brain cancer and was denied her request to spend the last couple months of her life outside of jail in the care and company of her family. I grabbed this news update of the net for those of you who are learning about this now.

Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz, the longest-serving female prisoner in the California penal system, is suffering from terminal brain cancer and has been hospitalized. The 60 year-old murderess, who became a born-again Christian while in prison, has applied for a “compassionate release” in order to spend her final days in the bosom of her family. However, California Division of Adult Institutions Director Suzan Hubbard has shown as little mercy as Atkins in her Sadie Mae persona showed Sharon Tate and her unborn son, giving the thumbs down to her request.

The Division of Adult Institutions is part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The merits of Atkins’ release request are now being investigated by the Board of Parole Hearings, which will officially consider the request during its next public meeting, which is scheduled for July 15, 2008. An inmate at the California Institution for Women in Corona, California, Susan Atkins has been hospitalized since mid-March 2008. Picked up and incarcerated in October 1969, Atkins originally was sentenced to death for her participation in the brutal “Manson Massacres” that shocked the country. Her death sentence was later commuted to life in prison when the California Supreme Court overturned the extant death penalty law in 1972.

Two days later, Carlin died.

Then last night I found out that writer Jim Goad (ANSWER ME!, Redneck Manifesto, Shit Magnet) has a brain tumor. I don’t know the details, but I’m going to give him a call and check in on him to see what the severity is and what the prognosis is. If you’ve never read Jim Goad, I insist you start.**

I had planned on my second post being about all the exciting and fun things I’ve been doing lately, and even though this is my blog, this entry isn’t about me. This one is for George, Traci & Susan. Three very different people, who inspired, shocked and entertained us, however…

I’m not condoning murder of any kind for any reason other than self defense, in which case it would be an ‘act of self defense resulting in homicide’, different crime altogether. And I want to make it very clear that I’m not grouping these people together, they are each absolutely nothing alike. If they have one thing in common it’s that they never compromised their true will for the sake of sparing peoples feelings, or in Susan’s case, peoples lives. They each represent very extreme avenues of passionate self expression. This is not a matter of right and wrong, it is now history only to become right or wrong again if and when it is repeated. History doesn’t repeat itself, dumb ass humans repeat it and like cowards attribute it to supernatural coincidence, what a piping hot load of BS that is!

We all know George Carlin was spot on right from beginning to end without skipping a beat. We all know that Susan Atkins actions were wrong, there is no excusing her crimes. But Carlins only as right as we (humanity) remember him as being and how much his work inspires how many people to do right, for themselves, their loved ones, communities, and the future. If Susan Atkins, her crimes, her wasted life in prison, all the obvious wrong that she represents inspire others to do similar, then her crimes and her life are ultimately negative and wrong. But should she be only remembered as a wrong doer, murderer, criminal, convict, cult member and so on if her life and what she chose to do with it should serve as reminder to all of exactly how precious, and at times precarious, life is and if the effect it has is a positive one that makes people think before they act, which will lead to a more self disciplined, self controlled, self aware & advanced human then why should she not be remembered as a martyr for a better world? Should Sharon Tate not be made a Saint of Peace on Earth. Instead these events and the impact they had and should still have are nothing more than fodder for talk shows, countless shitty Manson Family murders based horror flicks and probably more than 100 books on the topic that either glorify the events or mock the guilty, but never recognize it as an unchangeable part of human history that deserves to be treated with at least as much reverence as the completely fictional crucifixion of Jesus. I’ll write more about my personal philosophy and the significance of 1969, The Manson Family, my family, the Zodiac Killer, Kenneth Anger and how I believe they all tie together. This addendum is really meant to ease my mind because I’d hate for any of my friends or supporters to miss this point and be left wondering whether I think Susan Atkins is cool for murdering, or as cool as Carlin when I don’t think this way at all. Carlin defines cool. Atkins is an interesting subject, a curiosity, a monster and an incredible example of how far we haven’t come and how far away we are from getting where we ought to be by now.

Here’s to legends - the few living and the many dead, the few frightening ones and the many who will be remembered as heros forever.

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Infernally,

Stanton LaVey

Here are a few video clips that I feel are fitting…