Jonestown, 1978

There aren't too many news stories that I can remember from my first decade - but I do remember:

• Nixon's impeachment - this was made more vivid by my adults explaining they were going to fire the President. What did I know between impeach and fire? I was four. Impeach sounded ok to me - fire - well, I imagined they were going to burn Nixon, to set him on fire. I wrote him a letter of support dictated through my dad - apparently I said that "me and Bebe Rebozo will always be your friends."
  
• The 1976 presidential election.
• The Iranian hostage crisis - that did go on for a bit.
• Jonestown, Guayana 1978

Jonestown made a serious impression on me. All that poison Kool-Aid, all those dead bodies rotting in the jungle. My memory of the event itself is hardly different than the news footage - panning across Jim Jones' carnage. Body upon body - and little paper cups. I also remember someone telling me that they had only used the slim packets of Kool-Aid - the kind where you have to add your own sugar. But they hadn't added any sugar - only barbituates and potassium chloride. I remember thinking - "Well, I wouldn't drink any poison Kool-Aid without the sugar - that would be nasty."

Last night I watched a nearly two hour docu-drama of the Jonestown massacre. There were interviews with survivors, including Jim Jones' son. There was lots of stuff my 8 year old brain hadn't picked up or didn't hold on to at the time - like a Congressman and a news crew were shot dead. Or that vast numbers of people, including children, had been murdered (I guess they didn't want to drink the unsweetened Kool-Aid either). Or that Jim Jones seem to be vaguely Maoist (and despite the suicides, a kindler, gentler, form of Maoism) - with an odd mixture of socialism and Christianity and cult of personality.

The docu-drama did seem to miss out some of the details. How was the massacre discovered and reported? What happened afterward? They were nearish a Guayanese town - apparently locals and soldiers witnessed the shootings, but they did nothing? Why?

The Vol-in-Law commented that the 70s were a strange time of optimism and immunity. Why would a Congressman go into a cult compound, a kind of heart of darkness cult compound with guns, and assume that it was OK to go unarmed and meddle around and then leave safely. Contrast Jonestown with the Branch Davidians in Waco fifteen years later.