Some places and some people are evil. They exist as puss-filled sores on the landscape. They have no redeeming value, and only serve to remind us of the horrors the past possesses. No amount of time can erase this darkness, darkness that surrounds these places of terror, pain, and foreboding...they stand as monuments to the wickedness of men...and women.
Jonestown, Guyana...
On November 18th, 1978 the World watched scarring visions from aerial mounted news cameras. Almost 1,000 people lay dead, sprawled out like discarded ragdolls. Men...women...children...poisoned or shot by "true believers". This was the final chapter of Jonestown. The psychological web surrounding The People's Temple and its eventual move from California to the South American jungles of Guyana is complex. Add Jim Jones, the founder and leader of this tangle, and you had a recipe for eventual disaster.
Jim Jones and his followers "drank the Kool-Aid"...a term that conveys blind loyalty to an idea, loyalty that can illicit an individual to kill for an idea, or die for it. The term was bandied about frequently in the days and months following the tragedy, and while it seemed like it had its genesis in the Jonestown massacre, albeit apropos in every way, it had already been in existence for a number of years. In 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was published. The book entails a magical journey aboard a magic school bus painted in hippy psychedelic drag, piloted by a crew calling themselves The Pranksters.
They had nothing to do with Jim Jones or his followers. It was a journey of acid-dropping frolic across all classes of American culture. They travelled and shared a cup of LSD-laced Kool-Aid with all who wished to partake, and then wrapped it all into a pseudo-scientific novel...a drug-induced version of On the Road. What is important is the "drinking the Kool-Aid" reference...used to stop a mentally-ill individual from drinking the acid-laced beverage...apparently without success...he had a "bad trip", just as predicted...
After Jonestown the phrase took flight and has been used in its sycophantic context ever since...but is was not Kool-Aid the poor souls in Jonestown drank...
It was Flavor Aid...cheap, bought in bulk...one-gallon jugs of concentrate. The flavor was grape, mixed with cyanide in a 55-gallon steel drum, a twisted "wine" served to bring down the scythe of the grim reaper, either by the cupful or forcibly...in a syringe. Years later, the drum was still there, a silent sentinel to the horrors of what had passed. The poor souls of Jonestown didn't even get a first-rate beverage, they were shorted in their last earthly moments by a demented, miserly, and thoroughly false prophet...Jim Jones...and the term "Drinking the Kool-Aid" fully entered the lexicon, forever attached to this event and its legacy.
