And the beauty of it is that Manson includes himself, striking these smirking con-man/tangled-puppet poses, perfectly aware that he himself is accused of using shock and spectacle to sway impressionable minds. What appears as my quasi-fascist power over the masses, Manson's inspired performance explains, is just as illusory as Jerry Falwell's or William Bennett's. The differences between us are that I know it - I recognize and acknowledge that I was placed here by my audience, even that I'm literally pulling energy from them - and I say so and I share. With Manson you get your energy back with interest - hell, with fascination. You get it back transformed into red lightning and wisdom you can take home. Purified and asperged and refined and recharged. Because handing over your power to another in dull ignorance and losing it and following where it went like a hopeful dog is slavery and fascism, but handing it over to another in full knowledge and getting it back all electric and gleaming from contact is sex and magick and true love.

And if you have the power you can do anything with it... The podium's whisked away. Manson races back on stage, red shirt open to the waist, hellish gangster turned sexy rockstar, yelling "My beautiful people!" "The Beautiful People," their rant at the "fascism of beauty," joins the pit in freaks' unity and pride, and all bounce. Again, if you give someone energy willingly, who's manipulated? No one to any detriment and Manson knows it. He scans a spotlight over the crowd, encouraging them to see themselves and each other. This is often when he inserts a recital about the oppression the band has suffered on the road and their now-impressive string of victories, especially if tonight's show is taking place despite opposition from local forces. "I'm proud of you for coming here tonight," he almost always says, binding the crowd and the band together, implying that he knows they too had to drive through roadblocks to be here.

"The Reflecting God" closes the set and sometimes the show. There's hardly a line in this lyric that isn't summary and underline. "My world is unaffected, there is an exit here..." - it's only the world whose simplistic poles are God and Devil that's being destroyed, only the people whose future can't conclude without the Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon that won't be able to build on what they've learned tonight - "I went to God just to see/and I was looking at me." (Sometimes he sings "looking at you.") "Saw heaven and hell they were lies /when I'm God everyone dies." [Dies for good - no afterlife of reward or punishment. Once you opt out of the God-ruled system, your life, like yourself, is all you have.]

It's broken by the snapping staccato of "no salvation, no forgiveness" - lines Manson found razor-carved into a fan's arms, statements I thought too bleak to bear until I came to understand them. They don't mean "you are too awful to ever be forgiven" - they mean "no one can save or forgive you, no one has that authority over you, no one has the right to judge your worth" [human value and dignity over all] and awesomely beyond that, "there is nothing for you to be saved from or forgiven for - the system whose commandments they made you fear, the sins and crimes and guilts you are loaded down with,
none of it exists."

[If you grasp all this you face a world in which you actually determine for yourself, by yourself,
what you are going to do. Let that sink in. No guilt or hope of approval or sense of deserving or not deserving. Equal to everyone and with no fear of any Power That Be you can stand on your own feet and step forward from there. This may not seem all that stunning to anyone who wasn't raised Catholic, but to the rest of us... If you're in this spot with me you're suspended breathless, you're staring over the edge of the chasm, your heart's not beating, and Manson might do anything--]

--and he stamps into the huge, percussive chorus, which over the weeks and months of the tour has been stripped from the CD's two verses to its bare core: "Scar, scar, can you feel my power? Shoot shoot SHOOT, motherfucker -" Everyone, the whole hall, pounds and sings and howls cathartically and it goes on as long as Manson wants it to, as long as he can resist swinging his mike stand into the drum kit and flying blindly offstage. Why does this work the way it does? Because it's as huge and loud as it's stark and simple? Because of its mixture of defiance and despair? Does it mean "dare ya to shoot, fucker, nothing can hurt me now" or "what the hell, shoot, nothing matters anymore"? Bullets or needles?
No matter. The world you understood is splintered. It's over.

Almost incomprehensibly, there are encores. Do you get an encore after you destroy a world? Apparently so. When they happen, the first one is "Irresponsible Hate Anthem," and Manson appears in front of an American flag the size of a baseball diamond, its field of stars replaced by a shock symbol, a regular flag wrapped around his waist. "FUCKIIIIIIIT!" he shrieks and they're off at full gallop - the night's final manifestation of the all-American, anti-christ superstar, explaining the freedom to hate. (Doesn't that sound like something you Really Shouldn't Say? "Freedom to hate"? Go ahead. Say it.)

"1996," that screaming anticyclone of opposites, is held tightly in check for maximum concentration, Manson slowly declaiming the lyrics in a tour-de-force oratory unaccompanied by the band except on the massive choruses - "Anti-people, now you've gone too far, here's your Antichrist Superstar!" It is a statement of pinpoint clarity, as point after point is hammered home like an icepick. The limitless patience with which the Reverend has explained himself for years holds even now, as he deliberately holds each phrase up to the light in turn. "ANTI-Satan! And ANTI-black! The anti-world is on my back!" (Interesting to note that in this storm of negations of which he's careful to hit both sides - anti-girl and anti-man, anti-white and anti-black, anti-sober and anti-dope - he adds "anti-Satan" but not "anti-God." --And, rather touchingly, "anti-me" but not "anti-you.") Just when the tension of this slow taut delivery becomes unbearable, Manson unleashes the band and they rip through that utterly devouring downspiral of a last verse - "anti-money and anti-life/anti-husband, anti-wife/anti-song and anti-me/ I don't deserve a chance to be!" The prophecy theorists' Antichrist will lose his throne and his life - the Devil's black sacrificial lamb, chosen to die - and Manson's unhuman demagogue has already seen the end of the world; everyone will suffer now.

And that leads us to "Man That You Fear," that old song, that heartbreaking decrescendo, in which Manson looks at the world and asks "how could you?" It's a song of such bitter disappointment, of decay and things gone wrong...ants in the sugar, muscles atrophy, everything turns to shit, and though you loved the boy you're afraid of the man he's become. Again there's that theme of innocence lost, of learning the hard way that things just aren't what they should be. More times than I can count he's described his uncertainty about what to do with this power he's been given - whether to help and encourage, or to give up on a world that refuses to believe in itself, or in him.
Its staging is stunning. In the darkness between songs the microphone stand is switched for another one dressed in tall stalks of white lilies, Easter lilies, dappled bright red; when Manson comes out to sing he's draped in trailing rags like torn cerements, gravecloth, soaked and dripping in blood. A parable of the anti-resurrection, a Jesus who never rose, walking from the grave to witness. It came to me one night that the crucial line is "you've poisoned all your children to camouflage your scars" - that rather than admit its wrongs and face reality this culture has browbeaten and silenced generation after generation of inquiring minds, dead kids and battered kids and starved kids and even kids just shushed ("begin distrusting academic authorities, suppress their natural curiosity, and submit reason to unquestioning acceptance of Biblical authority.") Am I going too far to suggest that Manson is saying, even Jesus himself would question this? (--and who, indeed, to better understand all of this than the ultimate battered and abused child? the lamb born to sacrifice? who in the history of the human imagination ever suffered more to please his daddy?) Or is this the part of the Antichrist's history we never hear, how on the third day he does not rise to heaven, but walks the earth in his own mentor-father's role of accuser and advocate?

All of this could be. What is, is that the song is so sad, and yet holds to the theme. The world is so corrupt that it has to suffer ("I have it all and I have no choice but to") and yet one feels he's sorry; "someone had to go this far," he offers. But there's no wavering from the point. Manson stretches out his arms, opens the long bloody fingers.

(2) In the first draft of the show, this spot was taken by "Cryptorchid," and it's the only change from Version 1 to 2 that I regret. "Cryptorchid," with its delicacy, its snowlit mystery and innocence, was exquisite in this space; its core incantation, "Prick your finger it is done/the moon has now eclipsed the sun/the angel has spread its wings/the time has come for bitter things" had the quality of a prophecy, and "Antichrist Superstar" thundering in after it was like jackboots in new snow. "Each time I make my mother cry/an angel dies and falls from heaven..." -no, "Apple of Sodom" has its smoky charm and its own reasons to be, but nothing can replace "Cryptorchid," which is as pure as January starlight.