On The Media is produced by:
Rarely a week goes by without news media using an anniversary peg for stories and this week is no different. The Jonestown massacre, a mass poisoning of over 900 members of Peoples Temple, occurred 30 years ago this Tuesday. Tim Reiterman, a reporter who has covered the story since the beginning, talks about revisiting it every five years.
Reappropriating and rearticulating the metaphor: When I think of drinking the Kool-Aid, I'm referring to joining a group’s collective, delusional, and typically sanguine, mindset. I’m reminded amusingly of Ken Kesey's “Electric Kool-Aid” in Tom Wolfe’s “Acid Test”–not the mass murder at Jonestown.
I had been ruminating over this one for a day or so when I read a post on our local, on-line newspaper, the New Haven Independent, from a regular who signs himself FedUpWithLiberals, about a rise in fees at a local beach. He wrote: “ROBN Have no fear about the water. Much better for you than Kool Aid!”
That helped this crystallize.
FUWL, just this time I have to say that was in bad taste. As has been well-recounted recently, most people at Jonestown were murdered and I never thought Kesey's acid tests were a good thing.
I had lunch with the former, and I avoided demonstrating against war with the other all on the same day in Berkeley in 1971.
Ken looked too much like my eldest brother, driving his camera-armed armored personnel carrier onto the campus plaza, as my brother eventually was about to do (not exactly but, close enough for government work) here at Yale’s Beinecke.
A show of force, even mock force, is not a model for ending a war and Jones' use of force was just pure evil.
I have to agree with Stuart on this. I believe that drinking the Kool-Aid is a part the legacy of Tom Wolfe.
To be honest, I didn't know anything about the Jonestown Massacre up until listening to this piec you had in the show.
You must be culturally and historically illiterate to completely and totally miss the meaning of 'drinking the kool-aid.' Unless you were born in 1985 how can you not know about the Jonestown Massacre? Unbelievable. It means you are like a cult member who would follow orders to your own death. "Reappropriating and rearticulating the metaphor," what kind of post-modern garbage is that? You need to know what you are talking about if you're going to showboat. If you have such a command of the English language, get a command of history as well.
Please keep your comments relevant to this entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments on On the Media are moderated. On the Media reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the onthemedia.org Comment Guidelines before posting.
Back to Episode
