Background reading: History

Background reading for Inherent Vice:

Which to read first? Chaos (2019) has higher rating on Goodreads, but Rage (2015) has more readers. Chaos is shorter but they're both big books. I think I'll go with Chaos first, and read Rage if I want some more.

Tom O'Neill has instagram and twitter for Chaos. He lives in Venice CA according to his website.

I did not know about Operation Chaos: CIA's domestic espionage project targeting the American people from 1967 to 1974 whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements. Imagine the right being interested enough to explore the influence of Russia on the January 6th insurrection. Amid the uproar of the Watergate break-in involving two former CIA officers, Operation CHAOS had been closed in 1973.

Bryan Burrough works for Vanity Fair and lives in Texas.

Rage Reviews

NY Times: "What is new and valuable in “Days of Rage” is the comprehensive overview it provides of the violence perpetrated by would-be revolutionary vanguards from the end of the 1960s through the mid-1980s, including the Weather Underground (initially known as Weatherman), the Black Liberation Army (B.L.A.), the Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.), Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (F.A.L.N.), as well as a host of freelance desperadoes. They left behind a trail of bodies, including both their victims and, sometimes, themselves. And they also left behind shattered movements, ideals and hopes."

And, "Never have so few done so much to divide, confuse, discredit and demoralize so many in the much broader social movements from which they emerged."

And, "...much of it focused on the minutiae of underground organization and the clues and police procedures that eventually led to the arrest of many of the perpetrators of revolutionary violence. While Burrough’s sympathies clearly lie with the pursuers, he provides the pursued the chance to present their side."

Quote from the book: “young people who fatally misjudged America’s political winds and found themselves trapped in an unwinnable struggle they were too proud or stubborn to give up.”

Negative: "“Days of Rage” provides little historical context, or explanation for the forces that produced and shaped the left’s terrorist turn." And, "...in 1972 there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the United States, the implication being that they were all committed by left-wing groups."

"As the black militant H. Rap Brown famously observed in 1967, violence was “as American as cherry pie.”"

"Burrough has a weakness for snappy generalizations that brand rather than illuminate the era."

So this is slightly more right history, though I'm sure valuable. 

Chaos Reviews

Guardian "O’Neill’s investigations started 20 years ago with a commission from a movie magazine and they have continued ever since. Although he never managed to write the magazine article, his research monomaniacally took over his life."

"...this book is only an interim report on a sticky network of lies by the LAPD, the FBI and the CIA, which joined forces in an effort to muddy the truth about Manson’s crimes."

"There’s even a walk-on by Doris Day, the embodiment of the sanitised America ravaged by Manson. Day’s son, Terry Melcher, used her beach house to host orgies for a club of priapic buddies known as “the Golden Penetrators”; Manson, a wannabe rock star, supplied groupies to the revellers in exchange for a promised recording contract with a label Melcher managed for his mother."

Interesting suggestion, Manson was inspired by Stranger In A Strange Land by Heinlein. The above article doesn't list the novel, but I googled "what is Manson's favorite sci-fi novel?" and got this article. He liked Dianetics too. "Manson was barely literate, so he probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts." 

"His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. "

"Manson’s philosophy was “an idiosyncratic mix of Scientology, hippie anti-authoritarianism, Beatles lyrics, the Book of Revelation, and the writings of Hitler.”

"O’Neill’s dottiest character is himself, a lonely obsessive hoarding Manson ephemera in his cramped apartment, with 190 binders full of notes on his shelves, plus six extra stacks of unfiled documents, each of them four-feet high, littering the floor. He begins as a dutiful gumshoe like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe plodding down the mean streets, but he ends closer to the justifiably paranoid taxi driver played by Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s thriller Conspiracy Theory. As he admits, the loose ends are still not tied up and with so many of the culprits dead they probably never will be. O’Neill’s intricately sinister “secret history” often sounds incredible; that doesn’t mean that it’s not all true." (Guardian)

So I started reading Chaos, and honestly I didn't really know the details of Manson family, and how it fed in to and repulsed cultural narratives. Fascinating stuff. 

The events of Inherent Vice take play in April and May before the July trial of Manson.