Dealers of death

Please pardon me if this is nothing but stream of consciousness.

The final thing I did yesterday evening before turning out the light was finish reading Jeff Guinn’s The Road to Jonestown.

The book is as enthralling as it is appalling. I read every word of it, down to the acknowledgements and the end notes, trying to comprehend what cruel trick of the human brain made hundreds of people willing to follow such an obviously megalomaniacal charlatan as Jim Jones unto death.

Guinn gives as much information as you’d ever want to know about how Jones became what he became and how he drew and held followers (followers both simple and smart, but nearly all with so little critical-thinking ability). He shows how hard it was to escape the Peoples Temple, especially once Jones relocated to the jungles of Guyana.

But nothing can make sense of Jonestown.

I fell asleep feeling surfeited with death. Polluted with death.

—–

Then of course we all woke up to … Mass slaughter in Las Vegas.

I confess that, along with a lot of other gun-rights activists and gun owners, my first thought was, Here we go again.

Then numbness set in. Only later is there room for anything else.

So many strange things about this latest showy mass murder. How many prosperous retirees commit public slaughter? And who commits crimes with full-auto weapons (whether legal or illegal or some makeshift modification)? That doesn’t happen. But it seems to have happened. Horribly effectively. Last night.

The whys on this horror are thick and deep. And likely to remain so.

But the predictable reactions were as quick and shallow as is usual, these days. The usual narcisstic jerk had her ice-cold, bigoted say (though was blessedly and swiftly fired from her big-media job). The usual suspects danced in blood and ignorance.

Pardon me, too, for linking all to one source. Partly, that’s numbness. Partly that’s because Joel hit all the key points of the public reaction.

And everybody — everybody — wanted a political motive. The shooter was with ISIS! The shooter was a progressive Democrat! The shooter was a right-wing gun nut who v*ted for Trump and was found dead wearing a MAGA hat! (Actually, that last is the only political accusation I haven’t heard so far; but you can be sure it’s out there somewhere.)

Some personal irony here. I’ve been trying for the last week to compose a post about how everything has become politicized, and how that’s the sign of an over-governed, soon-to-be-tyrannical age. I was finally going to get to it this morning.

There was a time when, if a guy went up in a tower and started blasting, the first thing you’d think of was brain tumor. Or loser with a grudge. Or just plain thrill-killer. Now the first thing we want to know is what were his political affiliations?

That’s as sick as anything else in this dirty, bloody, sick business. But it’s hard for us to see just how warped it is, because this Hyper-political age is our age and its assumptions and attitudes are our assumptions and attitudes.

—–

In reading The Road to Jonestown, I learned a few new things about the mass murder/suicide.

I learned that three of Jim Jones’ sons were in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, when Jones ordered the deaths. The young men were playing in a basketball tournament. Jones hadn’t wanted them to go, but they talked him into letting them. He ordered them back as matters at the Jonestown settlement began to turn critical, but they refused to return because they were having fun. Then on The Day, he sent orders for all the Temple members in Georgetown to kill themselves.

But the boys — led by Jones’ only biological son, 19-year-old Stephan — not only prevented slaughter in Georgetown (just four died there; two suicides; two related murders, all in one family), but spent all that night calling Temple headquarters in San Francisco, persuading them not to join in the suicides and murders, either. A 19-year-old boy who had never known anything but cult life, possibly saved a couple hundred people by defying his father’s evil wishes.

I also learned that Jones and his followers had Masada in mind. The suicides and murders weren’t any spontaneous thing. They’d been rehearsing so called “white nights” for months, and like the (possibly mythical) defenders at the siege of Masada, they envisioned their deaths being some grand “revolutionary” gesture that would shake the conscience of world and let them go down in memory as bold, defiant heroes.

Instead — since the only siege they were under was the one in Jim Jones’ paranoid, narcissistic, amphetamine-addled mind — they went down in history as the original gullible fools who “drank the Kool-Aid” (even though that’s not what was in the infamous vat).

—–

It might be some time until we learn what “grand gesture” the creep (or, it may still turn out to be, creeps) on the 32nd floor imagined he was making. What paltry grudge he blew up into life-shattering proportions. What political agenda he imagined he could further. What kind of big, record-setting name he wanted to make for himself.

About all we can be sure of is that his ego was as big as Jim Jones’. And that he was just as self-deceptive. And every bit as cruel. And that somewhere, somehow, he got the notion that he owned other people’s lives and could dispose of them at his giant, selfish, ego-driven, self-deluding will.