[My intent is to return to the series of posts begun before my mother’s death wherein I discuss our neglect of the Historic Faith and the concomitant breakdown in our society. The post below was first published four (4) years ago, on October 11, 2019, and serves as a good re-introduction to the aforementioned series, which we will now continue.]
If you don’t denounce breakdowns in the fringe, you’ll soon see them lionized in the center.
In El Pao in 1958, we children did not know that, back in the States a horrible drama was unfolding, which, as I saw decades later, confirmed a comment I had heard. Something about breakdowns in the fringes of society, if left unaddressed, would take center stage.
This was an era when, for the most part, certain subjects were not discussed in the presence of children. I recall sitting in the El Pao bar with WWII veterans and never hearing a single curse or blasphemy. So much was the care to not offend children, that when Hollywood profanity was unleashed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s my shock at the language suddenly present in films was genuine and guileless.
So it does not surprise me that I only heard about the Starkweather murder spree decades later, when movies and at least one rock song were based thereon or alluded thereto.
We children did hear conversations about movies like East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause. Films which, according to the general tenor of the discussions, reflected disaffected, conflicted, alienated, and mutinous youth. You might call them Jean-Paul Sartre’s offspring. Furthermore, when families were portrayed, the depiction was not flattering.
I remember seeing Rebel Without A Cause during a movie night in the camp. Several things struck me: the father walking around wearing a girly apron; the absence or diminishment of God; an utter incomprehension as to what exactly was bothering the James Dean character; and revulsion at the Dean character’s drinking the family milk directly from the bottle and placing it back in the refrigerator. As usual, I assumed these themes were too profound for children; hence my distaste was probably unwarranted. However, I wasn’t alone in the confusion, as I heard adults talking about it and also expressing less than full admiration.
The series of aforementioned events took place in Nebraska. The protagonists were a nineteen-year-old young man who dressed, combed his reddish hair, and acted like the Rebel’s James Dean; and a thirteen-year-old girl who dressed and acted as much as possible as her Dean-like boyfriend, except her hair was dark brown.
These two could be Exhibit A for those Americans who “knew”, in a guts-knowledge sort of way, that the theatre, of all other arts, had perhaps the greatest influence or effect on behavior. But most did not know the men across the Atlantic who worked obsessively to use the stage and the theatre precisely to influence the society in which they were reared. Men such as Bertolt Brecht and, of even more influence in America, Kenneth Tynan, and a few others, who were transparent in their purpose: to promote hedonism and permissiveness, including the unrestrained use of coarse, blasphemous, profane language on the stage and in public: some, because they believed there was a link between the utter denial of self-denial and their socialistic political agenda; others, because they simply were compelled to tear down whatever Christian pillars remained in what they considered to be a stifling, boring, bourgeois society.
So we should not be surprised that Brecht fervently worked to use art “not as a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” He also said, “Don’t expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.”
Kenneth Tynan’s oeuvre can probably best be summed up with his, “I hope I never have to believe in God, it would be an awful confession of failure.” Well, he succeeded wildly in coarsening our culture. It is sad to think that, despite his ugly outlook, he did admire C.S. Lewis, who had been his tutor at Oxford. After having read Lewis’s The Hideous Strength, he said, “How thrilling he makes goodness seem — how tangible and radiant!”. It is unfortunate that he did not follow through with this admiration.
I will readily concede that by the time of these men’s work, there was already a demand, however inchoate, in western audiences for the excreta they would put out. But their impact is undeniable, nevertheless.
Of course, it is much easier to tear down than to build up. And the two Nebraska murderers certainly destroyed: a masterful vindication of Brecht, who died a mere 3 years before the events related here, and Tynan, whose influence was greatest in the America of the late 1950’s through the 1960’s. Not to mention the existentialist tenor pervading society, especially youth.
The girl’s parents (mother and stepfather) were opposed to her relationship with the young man and acted to stop it. In addition, the youth’s parents were also opposed, a position which enraged him to the point of physically attacking his father, an event resulting in his expulsion from home.
One night, the angry youth stopped by a gas station in the town where they lived. He pulled a shotgun on the attendant, a young man of twenty-one, married and soon to have been a father. Before long he lay dead, his head blown beyond recognition.
The youth then went to his girlfriend’s house where they killed the girl’s mother, step-father, and two-year-old sister with rifle butt, kitchen knife, and bullets. They stuffed the mother’s body down the outhouse toilet opening; crammed the baby sister’s body in the box that had been used as a garbage can and placed it in the outhouse; dragged the step-father’s body to the chicken coup and left it there.
They then cleaned up the blood in the house and drank pop and ate chips that evening. For almost a week, they remained there, buying food and milk on credit from the milkman, as her family’s corpses rotted nearby. When folks would come by to visit or inquire, they were scooted away by the girl who would tell all that everybody was very sick with a highly contagious flu, an excuse which soon began to wear thin.
They realized they’d have to skip town and decided to go to an old friend of the young man’s family: a seventy-two-year old farmer who often let the boy and his siblings play and hunt on his farm some twenty miles from town.
The murderous couple’s intention was to steal the farmer’s car. And kill him.
After shooting him in the head, wounding his dog as it ran away, and dragging his body to an out building, they spent the night in his house eating and drinking pop.
The next day they drove off but got stuck in mud and had to abandon the car and walk, with the old man’s 22 rifle and handgun. They were befriended by a teenage couple, childhood sweethearts, who offered them a ride. The killers asked them to drive back to the dead man’s farm; this they did, in innocent ignorance.
The seventeen-year-old young man was shot six times in the head; his sixteen-year-old sweetheart was shot once in the head and stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen and pubic area.
Their bodies were hauled to the storm cellar and abandoned there. The killers took their car and drove off, back to town.
There they invaded an industrialist’s home which the youth had often seen during his days as a garbage collector. They repeatedly stabbed the wife in the neck and chest, while finding a moment to break the family poodle’s neck to keep it from barking.
When the man of the house arrived, he was met with the barrel of a gun, but he quickly deflected and began a fight to the death with the killer, who excelled in only one class in school: gym. The fight dragged on but finally the youth got the upper hand and shot the forty-seven-year-old man dead.
The killer couple remembered the maid they had locked up in a bedroom closet. The maid, who was hard of hearing, meekly allowed the degenerate teens to tie her to the bed where she was repeatedly stabbed. They then drove off in the family Packard.
This time they drove west, towards Wyoming. They had car trouble. Seeing a car parked alongside a road, they thought it’d be a good one to steal. Its owner, a middle-aged shoe salesman was sleeping and the youth woke him, only to shoot him nine times in the head. That was to be their last murder victim, Mr. Merle Collison, husband and father. The murderer pushed the body to the passenger’s side and tried to drive off, only to have trouble releasing the emergency brake.
A young geologist saw them and, thinking they were having car trouble, walked up to the driver’s window only to have a gun pointed at him as his eyes glanced at the corpse in the front passenger’s side. He figured he had to fight and so did.
That was a good decision, for while they struggled, a Wyoming deputy sheriff drove by and, seeing the commotion, stopped. The youth jumped back in the Packard, while his girlfriend ran to the sheriff, quickly transforming herself into a damsel in distress.
After a short pursuit, both were in custody and returned to Nebraska where they were tried and found guilty of murder. He, playing the deceased James Dean to the end, was electrocuted in 1959; she made parole in the 1970’s.
Later in life, I apprehended how prescient had been that conversation I had heard, that the breakdowns in the fringes of society were not being explained, let alone denounced.
As severe deterioration was increasingly evidenced here and there (for instance, the Clutter murders took place in Kansas a mere year later), some (many?) parents were closed mouthed about it, believing that “the experts” – teachers, bureaucrats, psychiatrists, clergymen — were better able to deal with it. However, some clergymen, either directed their fury to wine and beer and other irrelevancies (alcohol played no part in this ghastly series of crimes), while others continued slouching their congregations away from the historic faith towards a sort of progressive twentieth century new beginning, cheerfully oblivious that, thus far, more people had been killed in that degenerate century than in any other, while still others preached what was termed an evangelical gospel message, but one that had little relevance to what was happening right before their very eyes.
In an age whose elite was feverishly busy destroying and mocking its Christian foundations, all under the guise of creating a truly “civilized society”, the church should have been dedicating the time and sweat to intellectually and spiritually denounce such intellectual termites.
So it is no surprise that, when it came to parenting, millions of parents of “The Greatest Generation” turned from the Bible to Dr. Spock’s humanistic advice in Baby and Childcare. The results have not been pretty as generations have been trained to look to themselves for solutions as opposed to seeking the Mind of God, our Creator and Redeemer.
To take two noteworthy examples, while parents and churches hearkened to humanism’s siren songs, Marx’s 19th century
Manifesto and Connolly’s 20th century “programme” were being promoted in the theatre and university and legislatures throughout the twentieth century and bore spectacular fruit: abolition of the death penalty; equalization of wealth; rehabilitation of criminals; free medicine; food subsidies; decriminalization of homosexuality; easing, if not outright elimination of divorce laws, thereby weakening marriage; children’s rights; elimination of all discrimination; and so forth. Question any of the above today and you will be denounced as a troglodyte. Or worse.
As for teachers, they were coming awfully close to intellectually justifying or at least “understanding” these acts – acts which even children (before twentieth-century-indoctrination took hold) could plainly see were wholly, horrendously unjustifiable by any civilized measure.
As for politicians and bureaucrats, they sought for angles and positioning: the political Freudians, in their myriad manifestations, urged more therapy and, therefore, more dollars to state-funded psychiatrists and psychologists, most of whom represented another, alien, philosophy as opposed to an empirical discipline; the political Quakerians, in their multifarious, contradictory incarnations, urged more jails, as if evil could be transformed into goodness by some inner light emanating from a cell in Sing Sing.
A mere twenty years later and beyond, Hollywood was making, not one, but up to four or more movies, in effect, romanticizing these murderers who were absolutely devoid of any sense of pity or compassion. A major rock star wrote a song about them. And a major publisher was backing a project where the murderous lassie would be able to tell “her side” of the story (she claims innocence, of course).
If you don’t denounce breakdowns in the fringe, you’ll soon see them lionized in the center.
In that era, the paradoxical 1950’s, precious few men forcefully and learnedly tied such actions, whether murder or otherwise, to their antecedent: a loss of the Faith. Lonely preachers valiantly made that case. But they were few.
Typical reactions to such acts were ineffectual because both the action and the reaction proceeded from the same source: an antithetical faith whose genesis occurred way back in Eden, where man determined to decide for himself what was good and what was evil.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980)
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, convicted murderers.
Robert Colvert (21), murdered gas station attendant. His only daughter, Barb, was born five months later. She still weeps when talking about him, given her recollections of interactions with her mother.
Mr. and Mrs. Ward. He was the industrialist who fought to the death. Still remembered as a generous couple.
Lilyan Fencl, the Ward’s maid. She was remembered as shy, gentle, quiet, and hard working.
Velda Bartlett: Caril Ann’s mother. One of the first murder victims.
Betty Jean Bartlett, the 2-year old step sister of the murderess. They killed her with the butt of a gun.
Murderer statement shortly before his execution in 1959. A self-pitying, alienated sentiment, worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is very much with us still.
