Tourist Miscellany #3

The Allure of CHAOS

For a forthcoming piece in Hedgehog on the idea of the conspiracy theory and the way that idea functions in The Discourse — (that way is “incoherently”) — I’m rereading Tom O’Neill’s Chaos for at least the second time. The book came out in 2019. It is unlike me to read a new book three times in three years, and it is “new”: for books, IMO, that’s anything under five years. (They take more energy to get through than TV shows or movies.) Also, the book is a long and in some ways very unpleasant odyssey through the Charles Manson case, which is not a subject I thought I was interested in before I read it (and before I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). I distrust true-crime as a genre, and I do not like thinking about the details of the Manson murders, or of any murders — whose thorax was sliced how many centimeters, who mocked whose dying whimpers, etc. I get sad, angry, and paranoid reading about things like that. The prose of the book, which is something I generally care a lot about, is mostly no more than decent, inoffensive.

But the book fascinates me. Partly that’s because it is a genuine monument of reporting, and O’Neill doesn’t hide the drama inherent in that reporting. He tells us what it’s like to be stonewalled by dozens of people at once. He tells us about rude and unpleasant interview subjects — chief among them Vincent Bugliosi,