Charles Watson sounds a lot cooler when you put the “Tex” in the middle of it, but that’s how people remember the horribly notorious Charles Manson-ite, Charles “Tex” Watson, who was in the headline scroll of the L.A. Times this week when his parole was denied by the California Department of Corrections, for the fifteenth time.

Watson was convicted in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders and was sentenced to death (along with Manson himself) at the end of 1971. California ended capital punishment in 1972 which meant Watson’s sentence was commuted to life with the very remote chance of parole. In his case and for all intents and purposes, that is likely a zero chance of parole, given the notoriously evil bent of Watson and the Manson Family’s 1969 murder spree. Thirty-five years after being incarcerated for his participation in the seven murders, Watson has become an ordained minister with his own church, and a college graduate with a business degree. He got married and had three kids. All while in prison. After this latest parole denial, Watson won’t go before the board again until 2021, when he’ll be 75 years old.

Seeing Watson in the headlines reminded me of how edge-culture purveyors of Generation X, myself include and deplorably so, were kind of fascinated by Manson. As a young lad just out of college in the early nineties I bought the Manson album, Lie, that had all those earnest, scratchy, weird-folkie songs on them. There was also the Manson connection to the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, very intriguing. And I bought the Dec. 1969, Life Magazine with Manson on the cover at some little shop in eastern Vermont, roundabout 1990—The Love and Terror Cult! I’m kind of ashamed I did nowadays, but recently I pulled “Garbage Dump” off the Youtube at the office and the officemates thought it was kind of catchy. It’s Manson. He gave “The Sixties” a bad rap for the generation that followed and Watson was an arguably even bigger psycho, if actions speak louder than forehead swastikas and bizarre interviews with Geraldo Rivera.

I went to San Quentin early this year and while I did not spot Charles Manson, I can readily report that there is no fair shortage of psycho killers among the 700-plus men on the three tiers of death row. But there are also redeemable men, and there may even be men who are not guilty of the crime that put them there. This is not an unusual occurrence.

This year Californians will vote on whether to end the death penalty outright (Proposition 62) or quicken the appeals process to speed up—to kickstart—the executions (Proposition 66—or, The Number of the Beast, Minus 6). In our upcoming issue we’re endorsing a bunch of things and one of them is Proposition 62, the repeal initiative that would commute all the current capital sentences to life-without-parole. So that, for example, someone like Tex Watson doesn’t waste taxpayer time and money with 15 fruitless attempts to be a free man again, after already having been found guilty for crimes For Which There is No Parole But God.

Forget that. And forget Prop 66, which contains some downright creepy language that’s nevertheless totally unsuitable for Halloween: Proposition 66, if enacted, “Exempts prison officials from existing regulation process for developing execution method.” The condemned are hereby instructed to check all apples for razorblades.

As these things go, people generally have either a good faith or bad faith view of government and public life. You either think public officials are basically decent people trying their darnedest to enact good public policy on behalf of the people, or you think they’re all a bunch of cynical crooks who manipulate a rigged system to selfish ends and cast votes based on the imperative of political self-survival. Foolish me, I tend to take the good-faith view of public officials, up to and including Hillary Clinton, which may not be the greatest trait for a journalist, but does help in the department of how to be a better human.

I’ll be both proud and wary to cast my vote for Clinton in a couple of weeks (is it over yet)? Proud because she has earned it and because I have high hopes that she will deliver, that she will extend and improve on the best of the Obama years, bring peace and justice where such things are absent, both here and abroad. Yes, she can. Let’s hope she does.

But I’m wary because of the Iraq war vote Clinton cast in the Senate, and the bad jingoism, the Cheney-like parroting of the Saddam-Qaeda link that went along with the 2002 vote. So I’m taking a deliberate but reluctant journey around that moral road-block and voting for Clinton anyway, despite a vote that reeked of bad faith. She has owned up to the colossal error of that vote and while I remain skeptical about Clinton I’m not cynical about her. My hopes are tempered by fears that range along a line of seriousness and gravity:

1. I fear that Hillary will start WWIII or some hapless proxy version thereof, that she will accelerate chaos with overly robust responses to faraway disasters, and she will be subsequently drowned in the Sea of Man as it rises to the electoral challenge in 2020. I hope she will have learned the lesson of that indefensible Iraq War vote and earn the Nobel Peace Prize that was prematurely given to Obama, through a foreign policy that emphasizes peace through restraint—with strength on the horizon as needed, and humanitarian boots on the ground.

2. I fear that in her zeal to “jump-start the economy” that she will capitulate to the lords of capital while failing to “save the middle class” and destroy the best of Obamacare in the process of cutting bad deals with Republicans in the service of a false bipartisanship of surface civility. I hope she gets along with reasonable Republicans and that there is some sort of genuine public rapprochement among moderates, and whoever else wants to come along, that delivers results and not just fleeting moments of happy-pants posturing on TV. Along the way I hope she enacts the best of the Bernie platform along with a Clinton Fixit on Obamacare that improves it, and its standing, with The People.

3. I fear that given the ample history and current obsession with emails, that she and her administration will become embroiled in scandals of such a distracting nature that “wag the dog” will look like “swing the DINO” by the time she turns outer Raqqa into a sheet of glass, to use the Cruzian construct. So I’ll vote for Hillary but with a zero tolerance policy for Clintonian shenanigans, and especially after eight years of no-whack Barack leading the way with cool dignity. I don’t expect Clinton to reach for Obama levels of coolness, but I do expect Tim Kaine to give her the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me for Christmas, and for her to enjoy it.

And on that cheerful note, I hope the Obamas invite the Clintons for Christmas and an early move-in to the White House, to ease the transition, and so that they can have The Talk with Bill one morning, in their bathrobes over coffee and cakes and Michelle with the stern-friendliest face of all. The ankle bracelet is presented, wrapped in a blue bow. “You were a mediocre commander-in-chief who talked a big game but squandered your presidency with the drama. Don’t blow it for her, Bubba.”

Yes, he can. Let’s hope he doesn’t.