Jonestown Writ Large

The Jonestown saga has always been presented through the lens of our news media with all the buff and gloss that every other story endures on its path to public consumption. We were left implicit and explicit themes that would be repeated for decades to come. Among these stated and self-evident assertions are:

1. Religion is dangerous, especially newborn religion.

2. Cults are religious in nature. Ergo, there is no such thing as a secular or political cult.

3. Cults prey upon people who divorce themselves from mainstream institutions, especially the news media.

4. Exposure to the outside world--news media, academia, mental health services-- will diminish the cult's influence over its members.

5. Cults can only exert influence over small numbers of people.

There are other cult axioms and some of them are valid. Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" identifies motives and personalities of joiners, but they are not necessarily pertinent to this column. This writer's position is that we now live in Jonestown writ large.

If that sounds hyperbolic, then let's take a glance at the tens of millions-yes, tens of millions! --of mind-numbed people who lined up to drink the metaphoric Kool-Aid that now comes in an injectable form. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

First, let's take a wiki overview of Jonestown:

James Warren Jones was born May 13, 1931 in Crete, Nebraska. He founded the People's Temple in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1955. From its inception, the People's Temple was as much a political cult as a religious denomination. "Apostolic socialism" was the temple's self-described dogma and from all indications it emphasized the latter over the former. Religion would serve as a vehicle to advance Jones' political agenda as well as a means of personal enrichment.

The temple scraped by in the Midwest, but in 1965, Jones moved his operations to Redwood Valley, California, and launched one of the most successful programs of personal prosperity, political elevation, pharmacological excesses, and unfettered abuse of minions. In the Land of the Dupe, the People's Temple would establish seven houses of worship with San Francisco serving as headquarters.

At the risk of perpetual tangency, let me admit that I hold a begrudging respect for Jim Jones. A door to door monkey salesman who could barely fill a pew in the church-frenzied Hoosier State, would find his congregation runneth over in California. It was long asserted that if one could not make it in the Midwest, one might find better fortune in the Golden State.

Charles Manson could not get arrested in Cincinnati. Well, actually he could. Let's give credit where credit is due. Charlie could get arrested in Ohio. Let's give him that. But what were the odds of Manson becoming a successful cult leader in the Buckeye State? Roughly the same odds as the death penalty being applied to Tex Watson.

If one is from the Midwest, one might be tempted with vicarious pride at the glory of regional rejects fulfilling their darkest fantasies on the attractive, if not beautiful, losers we call Californians. For better or worse, just about anyone from anywhere could be a cult leader in that enchanted land way back when. Marshall Applewhite, Jr., hailed from Spur, Texas. He and his wife, traveled the US and were able to reel in exactly one follower. The couple would move to California and shortly after his wife's untimely death, Applewhite would enjoy guru status. In 1997 in sunny San Diego, he would lead an exercise in mass suicide resulting in 39 deaths, including his own L. Ron Hubbard grew up in Montana, but his Church of Scientology would sprout in California. Sun Yung Moon arrived from Korea to rained down the flash flood of Christianity known as the Unification Church. The Moonies did well just about everywhere, but California once more was overly generous with her sons and daughters. Not everyone can be a movie star but cult leader...

Ah, but there was real vice in that Jones boy. He abused his congregation both physically and financially. Despite repeated accounts of mistreatment, Jones was able to avoid legal entanglement by getting out the vote for the Democrat Party. Jim Jones played an important role in the long war that turned California blue. Despite procuring friends in high places, the grievances against the People's Temple piled high. In 1973. Jones responded by establishing a commune in a remote section of Guyana. The settlement would be named Jonestown.

Claims of mistreatment and imprisonment at the Guyana commune were relayed to friends and families in California. A brave Congressman named Leo Ryan flew to Guyana with members of the press and disaffected relatives of Jonestown inhabitants. Jones was openly hostile to Ryan and his entourage and tried to prevent them from talking with his flock. Ryan persisted and spoke with several of the Jonestown residents, many of whom expressed the desire to return to America.

On November 18, 1978, tensions boiled over. As the entourage waited on a remote airstrip, they were set upon by Jonestown gunmen. Congressman Ryan and four other people lost their lives, and nine others were seriously wounded.

Shortly thereafter, the Jonestown congregation committed mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Tape-recorded audio revealed that there were loud, vocal rejections to the orders. Maybe the dissidents felt they stood a better chance with cyanide than with bullets. With machine guns pointed at them, 914 people killed themselves and their own children. Jim Jones rushed his own demise by planting a bullet in his head.

Jonestown would be remembered as a strange and tragic novelty. Comparisons to the People's Temple would be sputtered about after the Waco Massacre in 1993 and again, after the previously mentioned Heaven's Gate group suicide in 1997. Mini-Jonestowns dotted the American landscape and they would flare up about as often as tornados hit Brooklyn. People go nuts in their small, cloistered, religious groups. Bad things happen.

The Jonestown tragedy would leave us with the idiom, “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Wikipedia traces the use of this phrase and in many ways it resembles every other Wiki post for overt bias. It dredges up obscure uses of DTKA and greatly downplays the event that launched it into popularity.,

In 2008 the news media decided that Barack Obama would be the 44^th president of the United States, and they successfully manifested that event. Media bias was not invented in 2008 but never before had it become so blatant. On several occasions, BHO staged a cheesy fainting woman routine in the audience. Damsels in distress who would ultimately be revived after the ever-alert candidate produced a bottled water from under the podium and tossed it into the crowd. If you saw the YouTube videos in succession (Candidate Obama and President Obama pulled the gag at least eleven times, possibly more), you could see that every event resembled every other event to an unnatural degree. The faints were staged, and the media never called Team Obama on it. 

The press produced dozens and dozens of photographs where Obama seemed to have a swirling halo around his skull. Not one Jimmy Olsen went rogue and called out their peers for their foolishness. Each reporter was engaged in adulation one-upmanship. The news people were so gushy in their praise for BHO that they scrubbed most of their 2008 coverage of his campaign that might later prove embarrassing. If you did not archive CBS, ABC, NBC. PBS, CNN, et al, you can witness a faint overview by reading “Obama Zombies” or “A Slobbering Love Affair”.

Public displays of veneration such as the Western World had never seen, comparisons to God, YouTube videos where people prayed to, not for, Obama, celebrity sycophants, dozens and dozens of songs that honored Obama. Flatter. Flatter. Flatter. Flatter. Flatter. Flatter. Flatter. For whom? For a man the public did not know and did care to know. To this day, we know more about Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland than we know about Barack Hussein Obama.

Why did Americans go silly over a man they did not know or care to know? They drank the Kool-Aid.

Fast forward to the Morbid 20's and the Kool-Aid is not an abstraction. It comes in injectable form, brought to you by Pfizer. And Moderna. And Johnson and Johnson. For an overhyped disease, a disease in which the victims were frequently “asymptomatic” and this writer's case, about as discomforting as the common cold, for a disease that would yield a lower death rate than many strains of flu, for this mighty, mighty plague, we would shut down the world.

A quick review of the Silly Season. Surfers and kayakers were arrested for performing their activities in perfect isolation. Families could not use public swing sets, even when they were the only people in the park. Religious worship was banned outright in some places and singing was outlawed elsewhere. People were allowed in stores if they wore a used mask or even a snot-encrusted bandanna over their faces. Nothing made sense.

Some would say that a cult is not a cult until it demands irrationality from its members. Leaders like to test the loyalty of their followers by asserting anti-logic on the flock. The origin of the disease, the merits of herd immunity versus isolation, the efficacy of masks even when they were used correctly, the efficacy of social distancing, the efficacy of plexiglass shields, the ignoring of the resulting supply chain problems brought on by over-reaching policies....Out of the new rules and new rulers, the Cult of COVID would produce a series of experimental vaccinations that would be heralded as a triumvirate of panacea.

Seeking quarter from an overhyped plague the cultists scurried to get injected with something that was at best, worthless. The Cult of COVID was not created out of snake feathers. It drew from the ranks of a hive mind that holds the news media to be arbiters of truth, if not infallible oracles. A massive secular cult that just needed a sacrament. Just a sacrament and an inquisition. Just a sacrament and an inquisition and a crusade.

Cultism has reached a new zenith and the 19ers challenge the conventional wisdom on such things. Firstly, Coronas are not limited by number or by geography. The tribe consists of hundreds of millions of followers and boasts adherents in every country.

The Cult of COVID is a political, not a religious, cult. Political and religious cults are similar in a lot of respects except that political cults always seek expansion. They are not going to isolate themselves like the Amish or the early Mormons or even the Jonestowners. The hive will always try to convert or conquer. Always.

Whereas religious movements often removed themselves from social institutions—academia, news media, medicine, religion, etc.--The Cult of COVID has infiltrated and sometimes has conquered these associations.

We are witness to the rise of the fastest-growing, most pervasive, most populous and most dogmatic cult in history. COVID will run its course, but the zealots will remain. They will accept proscriptions and mandatory prescriptions from on high and they will demand the same for all of us. Like it or not, we now live in Jonestown.