WHAT HATH GOTH WROUGHT?

There are two gifts that God in His infinite mercy rightly refuses to bestow upon the same person. The first is an ability to paint oneself many colors and prance across a stage screeching songs in praise of violence, hatred, and pain. The second is a sense of humor.

Emerging from the mean streets of Ft. Lauderdale, “Marilyn Manson” — or Brian Warner, as he was known back when he hunted Easter eggs at his parents’ country club — has recently conquered prepubescent rock music, the latest in a line of shock-rockers that reaches back to Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and Ozzie Osbourne.

A traditionalist, Manson adheres to his genre’s stern customs: the cross- dressing, the Nazi paraphernalia, the satanism, and the desperate desire to stage a show obscene enough to provoke arrest. Though sometimes declared a uniquely 1990s performer, Manson seems in fact to have found most of his show at the garage sale of discarded rock acts of the 1970s: the face-paint of Kiss, the homosexual posing of Queen, the violence of the Sex Pistols, the musicianship of Donny Osmond, and the lyrical profundity of the Captain and Tenille — Manson’s over-produced slow songs sounding like nothing so much as the sad tail-end of the three-day bender Muskrat Suzy spent in Tijuana after the divorce from Muskrat Sam.

But by adding a few new features — slashing himself with bits of glass, wearing iris-warping contact lenses, and parading with naked women on dog- leashes — Manson has managed to obtain, from the likes of Pat Robertson and William Bennett, the denunciations he reprints as recommendations on the backs of such albums as Antichrist Superstar and on his book, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, currently number thirteen on the New York Times bestseller list.

While his roadies hawk T-shirts reading “Kill Your Parents,” Manson stages elaborate concerts promoting “goth” — a pastiche of anything that ever struck thrill-seekers as shiveringly dark and spooky: animal sacrifice, eye makeup, black Masses, sudden bursts of baby talk, self-mutilation, fascism, and dank cellars.

It’s evil, no doubt, but it’s also astonishingly silly. Unlike, say, Frank Zappa with his self-mocking obscenities or Lou Reed with his deliberate attempts at avant-garde decadence in the 1960s, Marilyn Manson appears not to know what a historical jumble he makes of things. He’s got all the elements of camp, except the campiness. Stripped even of the sickest irony and humor, Manson actually seems to mean it — which makes one wonder who his fans could possibly be.

It was in a Washington bookstore that I first saw an answer. She was pink and not pretty, a little spotty and a little pear-shaped, pudgy and half- sexed the way thirteen-year-old girls sometimes are, dressed in pink cotton hot-pants much too old for her and pink plastic sandals much too young.

While her father browsed among the car-repair manuals, she tugged at his shirt, winding her legs together in the complicated spiral only teenagers can manage and whining for The Long Hard Road Out of Hell because all the other kids had copies and Marilyn Manson is so goth. And when her father finally snapped that she could buy whatever the Hell it was if she would just leave him alone, she skitted off happily in the flat-footed, stop-and-start canter of the momentarily unself-conscious adolescent.

I too picked up a copy of the purported autobiography, and found myself unable to forget that pink girl while I read through the shock-rocker’s boastful grotesqueries. There’s little in the 250-page book about making music, but there are plenty of scenes of constant and glorified drug use, scenes of mocking micturition, scenes of violent and derisive sex, scenes of jubilant abortion. I see no escape: That child will be corrupted, and her father is a negligent fool.

And yet, the corruption in the book is not just the destruction of innocence. It’s also the confirmation of immaturity, which is something worse: an odd and wicked permanent adolescence, the sealing-in-forever of the mental state of a thirteen-year-old child. Manson’s culture-war critics denounce him as a satanic seducer, the drug-lord destroyer of religion. They’re not exactly wrong, but they miss the breathtaking naivete of it all, hilariously mocked in a recurring Saturday Night Live send-up of goth. And it is this naivete that is both so unconsciously comic in Marilyn Manson and so damning.

Probably not one in a hundred children reading Manson’s book will try to wear the goth leather, crosses, and chains. Probably not one in a thousand will try to live it. But who can escape the thought that the pop star, makeup and ludicrous costuming aside, is also modeling a way of life that is both insidious and alluring, the mind and desires of an adolescent in the body of an adult? As I took the book downstairs and threw it in the trash, I thought about Manson — his autobiography in the hands of that girl from the bookstore, pink and silly, liable to gallop off in any direction, as awkward and unformed as a colt. God, I pray there is a Hell.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.