Kool Aid Never Tasted The Same: 30th Anniversary of Jonestown Memorial Thread

thirty years ago this week the reverend jim jones led his followers in a mass suicide. read the excruciating details here in a classic bit of new journalism:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24344365/in_the_valley_of_the_shadow_of_death/

in a way this event was, and is, so horrifying that I don't think its cultural significance has ever been deeply explored. the apotheosis of the cult movement.

http://www.desktoprating.com/wallpapers/sports-wallpapers-pictures/nike-wallpaper.jpg

The incident at Jonestown was the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001, and at 918 dead, the largest mass suicide on record.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Jonestown-Newsweek1978_CutOfDeath_2.jpg/462px-Jonestown-Newsweek1978_CutOfDeath_2.jpg

http://www.foxnews.com/images/466204/0_21_111608_JimJones.jpg

I remember how OMG that Newsweek issue was, full of corpses right there on the cover. I seem to remember some eedjits cancelling their subscription, but it really got the horror across.

One of the first major news events as such that I remember. Memories include the Newsweek cover, filmed bits of the attack on the airport that killed Leo Ryan...I didn't so much feel horrified as confused, though I don't remember if I asked my parents much about it.

Tom Kipp did an excellent presentation on Jones at this year's EMP, “’I Never Heard a Man Speak Like This Man Before!’: Song, Horror and Tragedy in Jonestown, and a Convincing Simulation of Hell," talking about the traditional song 'I Never Heard a Man' being invoked on one of the last tapes made in Jonestown. From my notes on his presentation I wrote down this thought from Kipp: "Few willingly drank [the Kool-Aid], and the phrase is now in currency when it should be rejected."

LA Weekly ran a story the other week worth reading, about the impact on one family as discovered via some lost papers that turned up during a house renovation:

http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-23/news/from-silver-lake-to-suicide/all

God, my parents cut the stories about this out of the newspapers so we wouldn't see the and be upset. Which kind of made it worse and more scary, knowing that something awful had happened, but not knowing just what, until ages later.

That Rolling Stone article is incredible.

The ordeal is at once one tragic (obviously), scary as fuck & morbidly fascinating. Ned (and others), this classic audio documentary: Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, has personal accounts of some of the survivors interspersed with utterly creepy gospel singing (a concept I didn't know existed until I heard it here).

Also worth looking into is the excellent recent film Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, which is viewable in its entirety on YouTube.

Ned, I addressed that last post to you b/c of your comment on that Kipp presentation. Do you know if an audio recording of it is available?

I'm not sure, but I do know that there's usually a fair amount of recording from the audience going on at EMP.

that newsweek cover freaked me out so much as a kid. the whole story did. and later the powers boothe t.v. movie.

soledad o'brian's jonestown special last night on cnn was really pretty good. she interviewed a bunch of the survivors. so heartbreaking. so many stories of later drug addiction and sad lives for most of the people who made it back alive. she went back to the site with a girl who escaped that day and it was pretty powerful. oof.

i was too little to be impacted by this when it happened but i've heard about it what seems like most of my cognizant life. the documentaries I've seen on it since have just been really horrifying. it's odd to think that something this important still seems kind of like a footnote to american history, maybe because it didn't happen on US soil, maybe because it predated VHS and cable and easily-recallable media memory.

tim armstrong of rancid told me once that one of his childhood friends died here. this is my only 'conversation with a member of rancid' story I have.

i didn't know the story of the woman who was an aide to the congressman leon ryan. she just became a congresswoman this year, 30 years later. she was shot five times that day. jackie speier.

Yeah, Jackie's good people, as they say. A tidbit I just dug up that I was unaware of was that Leo Ryan had invited Dan Quayle to join him on the trip, as the two were committee members together in DC and had become friends, but that Quayle was unable to make it.

the LA weekly story got me thinking about this again. the family members letters were heart-rending. and that rolling stone story is almost too vivid. last year I read a flawed but quite brilliant book about Jonestown: "Journey to Nowhere" by Shiva Naipaul, written in the wake of the suicides. it's structured as a travel narrative, moving from Guyana to California with a lot of insight about third world politics and the nascent new age movement, though by the end it feels like Naipaul had his mind blown and/or even had a nervous breakdown.

there were two made for TV movies about j-town, the one with Powers Boothe was better (the other was a miniseries IIRC)

it's weird what you remember about big events. the week after this happened I recall very clearly being in a music club in ann arbor, waiting for the first band of the night to come on and as the lights dimmed somebody yelled "JONESTOWN!" and I felt pretty creeped out, especially since the band was called CULT HEROES. er, punk rock.

FLAVOR AID

NOT KOOL AID

The PBS American Experience episode is really potent. That recording of the final half-hour of everyones' lives is gut-wrenching.

But OTOH everything about Jim Jones/Jonestown is really potent because of what it is.

Less gutwrenching but still just mindblowing, Jim Jones's sermons... when he does that scream/gurgle thing... holy shit! "I'VE GOT A HELL WHOLE LOT TO FIGHT.. I GOTTA FIGHT... I GOTTA FIGHT... AAGLGLGLGLAAAAGLGLALAAAGLGLALGLALGLGLALGALGL"

Brian OTM on Flavor Aid.

Watching MSNBC's documentary last week, it struck me that Jones looked like a lesser version of a cheesy movie star: Burt Reynolds.

Rolling Stone article may get better after the ridiculously self-aggrandizing "I really gave it to the Krishnas at LAX" opening but I'll never know 'cause Christ what self-righteous crap.

You can stomach reading ILX all day but not a fifteen page article about one of the most important events of the 20th century? Fascinating.

Pages 2-4 are all about festering, melting, swollen corpse details.

And you know what?
As someone who has been woken up two days in a row by religious types knocking on my apartment door, I say sincerely, fuck any group of people who want to push their religious views on others. Harmless or suicide cult, i don't care.

given that I've read a couple of books about this event and many articles besides, as well as the newspaper reports the week it happened, yeah, I think I can pass on an "incredible" article that decides to open with "check out how righteous I am, my readers"

sorry to hear that people woke you up, too - how horrible!

Yeah cuz it's cool to interrupt peoples lives to talk about JESUS, of all things.
that said, glad you got to live through jonestown (okay, you're older than i thought) and I'm glad you have read up about it, but is it really a better position to be "fuck this guy for being a dick to the krishnas"?

I should probably disclose and say: I've spent a lot of time with the Krishnas. They are good people. There have been a couple of grotesque scandals (New Vrindavana, though it had splintered from the main sect by the time of the awful Monkey on a Stick stuff; the Dallas gurukula post-Prabhupada appears to have been a true horror, unforgivable) but for the most part anybody without an axe to grind can see that they were & remain sincere people. I like them. Dude can take his "I have seen through them, now that there's been a big deal with a totally unrelated cult" and, umm, get a little more mature about it. Hey check out J0hn D. tellin ppl to get more mature in criticizing religion, where's Dan P. I know he'd dig this.

I mean if he drove to LAX he must have passed the gigantic neon red JESUS SAVES sign downtown but I note that he didn't give those guys a piece of his mind

You might want to keep in mind that this is not a recent article. The fellow criticizing the Krishnas was not doing it in 2008 but immediately in the wake of a horrible tragedy involving a fringe religious sect, which is (probably, i was not born) how most people viewed the Krishnas in the late seventies.

okay, perhaps tasteless, but anyone else ever see that grindcore band called "Jim Jones Party Mix" ? Brutal shit.

Brian Jonestown Massacre to thread?

In Roller Boogie (1979), one character throws in the towel and becomes a Hare Krishna to forget disco music and roller skating after learning that the roller boogie contest is going to be canceled.

"Doesn't this Jonestown stuff make you wonder about yourself?" I asked.

"What?" She looked up at me in shock.

"Selfless commitment," I began.

"It's the oldest..."

"They killed the babies first," I said.

"...religion in the world. We have..."

"Potassium cyanide."

"...members in all..."

"Dead," I said. "Men, women, children, old, young, black, white...."

Her eyes glazed over and she turned from me, walking rapidly in the general direction of the United Airlines ticketing desk. I followed along after her, the way so many of them had hounded my steps over the years in airports all over America.

"They were people who couldn't look into themselves," I insisted. "Good people. People who fed the hungry. Who helped others. And now they're lying out there in that goddamn jungle..."

She stepped up her pace.

"...swollen. Grotesque. Nothing more than thirty or forty tons of rotting meat."

She ran from me, her bag full of magazines and albums thumping against her hip. I felt both ashamed and full of fierce, brutal joy. There were a dozen of them at least, between concourse A and concourse H, and I got every one. All you had to do was "Jonestown" them and they fled like rats.

against self-righteousness, the author offers...self-righteousness. The Krishnas are a fringe religious sect for sure! He's not criticizing them; he doesn't know anything about them other than what he's decided he thinks, based on - well, who knows? Based on "common sense," I guess. When I suspect people are relying on what they call "common sense" I start looking for the exits, 'cause it means they think they already know everything. Gimme a brainwashed doctrinaire cultist over a guy who's figured it all out himself nine times out of ten.

Of course the tenth time it's gonna be Jonestown or Heaven's Gate but what the hell, I like my odds

xpost to the table - there was an HC band a while back called Guyana Punch Line, all time great band name

that is pretty amazin, john. never heard of 'em, which is surprising.

In fairness the guy does say he's ashamed at himself for his righteous aggressiveness. And it *was* just after it'd happened. And even I remember the krishnas being thought of as dodgy cultists in the 70s.

like that scene in Airplane!

So, cuz the guy figured out a topical way of getting the recruiters to leave him alone, and mentioned it in a story, it's okay to discount everything else he had to say? xpxp

also, your take on valuing the opinions of fringe cultists over the opinions of the self-confident (or self-righteous) strikes me as disingenuous, or if you're sincere, as borderline absurd.

LOL table I was thinking the same thing haha.

good to know i'm not alone.

I remember finding a site with audio recordings and transcripts of the suicide/massacre thing--horrible but could not stop listening.

JM, at least some of that might be on the audio documentary I linked to upthread. I can't remember if recordings of the event were featured in it, but it does contain a lot of actual Jonestown footage. And horrible but could not stop listening is OTM.

jesus christ whatever John just said he didn't want to read the article, he didn't want it eliminated from the internet or anything, he's not exhibiting any contempt prior to investigation here. I do think that article is just a tad hyperbolid on the descriptions after the second page, to the point where I didn't really care to read it anymore, but everything in rolling stone in the 70's was like that.

Anyway jackie spier has a write up in the chronicle today: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/17/MNB414357H.DTL

Yes after three pages of mouldering corpses in the heat I basically called it quits.

i remember that rolling stone piece too. tim cahill is a pretty cool writer. a wolverine is eating my leg is a good book. (i think that was the title.)

I saw a (the) documentary a couple of years ago w/ a Q&A with Jones' son. Was disappointed (but not surprised) how many questioners still wanted to go on about how Jones' church was/could have been great, a new open-minded kind of spirituality, blah blah blah. . . creepy nonsense still.

"Gimme a brainwashed doctrinaire cultist over a guy who's figured it all out himself nine times out of ten."

Do I get any other choices? I'd still take the guy that's figured it all out himself, I think.

the la weekly story almost makes me regret that i stopped reading that rag

what re-reading the history of Jim Jones in SF reminds me off, actually, is Yusef Bey and the Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland; a strong community force that has convinced the city government of it's usefulness because of its good deeds, while operating on the fringes (or really, over the line) of legality.

anyway cults are kind of interesting to me so any recommendation on books about cults is welcome, I've got nothing to read at the moment.

There's a book called "The New Religions" that's a pretty even-handed sociological look at the major cults of the 70s - pretty dry reading, but interesting

I think most people have read "Under The Banner of Heaven" at this point, but it's worthwhile if you haven't yet.

rickross.com has almost a book's worth of material

I started reading that LA Weekly story when it came out and had to stop halfway through because it was so disturbing. I'm not the type of person to easily get freaked out by something I read, but for some reason stories about cults really bug me out.

I couldn't watch that video of that american dude getting decapitated a few years ago but I could listen to the jonestown recordings

The 'Special Report' headline on that Newsweek cover seem so redundant, so out of place.

I wept at the end of that LA Weekly article.

The first time I ever took a Greyhound bus by myself (from D.C. to NYC, at age 12), I sat next to a guy whose wife died in Jonestown. I had never heard of it before. He told me the whole story on the ride and it terrified me; I've been obsessed with reading about this kind of stuff ever since.

The Powers Boothe movie is one of the wildest TV movies of all time, and - if it's possible to view it out of the context of the incredible horror of Jonestown - an insane camp classic. Boothe, Ned Beatty, Irene Cara, Ron O'Neal, Randy Quaid, Brad Dourif, Veronica Cartwright, Diane Ladd, etc. etc. etc.... total madness.

J0hn got testy at me when I started a thread about Krishna-core years ago and called the genre "wacky" or something!

There was no mention of this event in the MILK film aside from a brief reference at the end to 'bubble bath and kool aid'.
This http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2008/11/jonestown-harvey-milk-and-george.html seems to be saying that maybe there should have been. I don't get what the actual connection is between Harvey Milk's murderer Dan White and Jim Jones, other than how "White’s murderous instability appeared to have been set off by the Jonestown murder-suicides and their link to San Francisco...". Any experts on this era on ILX? I can't believe how un-known-about this event is in the UK.