The other night I watched the new documentary on Jim Jones and the Guyana Massacre. This piqued my interest to learn more. Must say that when the event actually occurred back in 1978, I was living in Boston and having a good time and thus paid little attention to it. My impression back then was pretty much my impression now; rather, was my impression until I started digging deeper.
I have never been one to accept the standard version of anything. I have learned in my overly long life that when a major event occurs, many forces (federal government, the media, etc.) are brought to bear to shape something to their liking. In a word, I had formerly thought of Jim Jones (above) as just another cultish-type leader whose megalomania and power over his followers drove 900 of them to commit suicide. Bad as that already is, it is only a tithe of the story.
I have listened to some of the tapes and read the transcripts of the People's Temple gatherings while in Jonestown, Guyana. And I am horrified. There is a bloodthirsty paranoia that colors everything. On one tape, we hear the congregation come forward one at a time and describe in graphic detail what they would like to do to their parents and former friends back in the "vomit" called America; the objects of their hatred are the people who either fled Jonestown and the cult or who were trying to get their loved ones out. With Jim Jones sitting on his throne (a lawn chair) and encouraging the throng, even little children come forward and talk about hanging relatives "by their balls" and roasting them alive. They speak not just of vengeance and death to those who oppose them, but sadistic torture. The Reverend Jones just giggles. And such vile language. I won't repeat what is on the tapes here, but there was no thought or word too graphic. In "fairness" to this zoo, Jonestown had long since ceased being even a nominal religious organization. With the sinister Reverend Jones ruling with an iron fist, vicious, paranoid Marxism was the guiding faith of all. The sad fact is: Left to their own, I think virtually everyone would have left Jonestown. But such was his power and terrible menace, that Jones turned this jungle clearing into a private concentration camp.
Mind alteration? Brainwashing? You bet, and plenty more. Fascinating subject. http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/
My grown son, Clip (below, age 4 or 5, in Camden, Maine), was filmed for the local PBS and will have his movie debut soon. It was part of a segment on farming, I believe, and Clip was shot while up in a tractor bailing hay. He said that a couple of his buds were drinking beer and ragging on him as the cameras were rolling. Another big thing that came to the little crossroads known as Dover, Kansas, (where I once lived and where Clip still does) was the National Pie Contest. The old gal (a Mrs. Grubb, if one can believe that) who bakes in the Dover Cafe won and the cameras were once more rolling on "Good Morning America." That place has always been known for pie. Years ago I would take Clip in there when he was a little boy for a slice on whatever was on the menu. I believe a piece of pie was a buck twenty-five twenty years ago.
Just like the rotten economy beyond, my own personal economy is in the tank. There are some nice things that should happen eventually, but I am reminded of the frozen wanderer who dies in a drift within sight of his warm cabin--he's just as dead whether he's one mile or a million from home. Moral: One must tuff it out.
My good friend in Denver, Jeff Broome, has a new, affordable paperback coming out soon called Dog Soldier Justice. The story recounts the horrific treatment two white women captives suffered during the Indian Wars on the High Plains. Jeff is a meticulous researcher and fine writer and this book is groundbreaking.
http://www.amazon.com/Dog-Soldier-Justice-Susanna-Alderdice/dp/0803222882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226591303&sr=1-1
(To commemorate Veteran's Day, here is a brief, inglorious account of my own brief, inglorious career in the US military.)
"Bumfuzzled." That is the word which best describes my experience with basic training. A poll was not necessary. I didn't need to hear what the guys next to me were thinking. Just one look at their faces . . . that was enough. It told me all I needed to know about my own face. "Bumfuzzled" . . . that is the word.
We were stunned. Even were we capable of rational thought at eighteen, there was no time to think. There was our hair, curled around the barbers' chairs like a pack of mangy coyotes. More efficient than any sheep-shearing shed, we were run through the scalping in mere seconds. This was our first reality check. At the height of Beatle-mania, when leggy chicks in mini skirts were doing chaps with the bushiest dos, here we were, Samson-like, shorn of ours; not only was our strength laying there on the floor, but so was our sex life. We weren't guys anymore; we weren't girls, either; we were just bald, stupid things that sprang and ran when someone--anyone--screamed: "NOW GET OUT OF THE BARBER'S CHAIR, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!"
Next, chow, our first, and sure as shootin', just like Dad said, it was "s--t on a shingle" (chipped beef on toast). But Lord, that was good! Or was it? Next, more shouting and confusion as we scrambled to get our clothes and equipment. Actually, by this time I was so confused that I am not sure about the order of the above, or the time. It might have been 3 AM or 3 PM; we may have been in America or Angola, for all we knew; these were mysteries we neither knew about or asked about. I only know that we ran from pillar to post those first few hours. Sleep? I don't remember a wink.
The day of bumfuzzlement began in Kansas City twenty hours earlier. That is where we were run through the medical mill. I have always been modest; just hated to shower with other guys in high school. On this day, however, modesty was a luxury I never even thought of, much less expressed. Stripped to our briefs, the medical staff ran us from one station to the next just as I had seen Laplanders herd reindeer on TV. These examiners (mercifully, they weren't women!) looked into every crack, cranny, crevice, and awful orifice one body could possible contain.
I hated, hate, and always will hate, shots and needles of any kind, but the blitz this day was so overwhelming that I don't remember feeling a thing. With a multiple-shot "gun" in each hand like Old West duelists, the medics on each side of we nearly naked creatures blazed away as we passed between them. "Don't move or it will shred your arm," they yelled. Some did move and, indeed, the docs weren't lying.
Sometime later that morning or afternoon, there was a mass swearing in. I suppose we swore to defend the US against any and all enemies, foreign and domestic, but, in our stunned condition, for all any of us knew we were promising to sell our parents into slavery.
Somehow that day, we found ourselves aboard a big jet; my first such ride and I suppose, judging by their bewildered looks, the first for everyone else, too. Do remember looking down at sunset as we crossed into Texas and discovering that the Red River really was red. Love Field--Dallas. Wow! Kennedy shot here. Or was he? Landed in San Antonio late that night and thus began our first few hours of bumfuzzlement at Lackland Air Force Base.
Very quickly I discovered that I was not meant for the military, nor it for me. Because of the Vietnam War, our basic training covered a mere month, rather than the usual six weeks. Like the first hours, the first days were a wild, spinning, confusing time, indeed. Absolute and total bumfuzzle best sizes up our brief stay.
"GET OUT OF THOSE BUNKS, YOU ASS HOLES!"
"GET OUT OF THOSE SHOWERS, YOU ASS HOLES!"
"GET OUT OF THIS BARRACKS, YOU ASS HOLES!"
"GET OUT OF THIS WORLD, YOU ASS HOLES!"
Within a day or less, the "ass holes" in question didn't know if the ass holes were animal, vegetable or mineral. That, of course, is precisely the condition these slave-drivers sought of their slaves. Cleaning, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, brushing, dusting, shining, sewing, ironing, buffing--at the end of thirty days we would have made great wives for any group of men. Running, jumping, crawling, grunting, groaning, aching, paining, coughing, gagging, spitting, sweating, and marching, Marching, MARCHING--when "lights out" came each night there was no need for the sergeant and his goons to scream at us: "NOW GET IN THOSE BUNKS AND GO TO SLEEP, YOU ASS HOLES!" All one hundred ass holes were out in five minutes. Not once did I hear an ass hole playing a harmonica like in the movies; nor did I ever hear an ass hole laying awake, wistfully wondering to his ass hole bunk mate how the ass hole's folks in Ohio were doing. Poker? Ha, ha, ha.
Somewhere in the midst of all this we managed to go to classes where we had certain fundamentals of military law driven into our thick domes; things like, "If you are captured by the enemy, you WILL try to escape." Well, fancy that! The government also succeeded in getting our entire outfit food-poisoned one night and the misery of one hundred sick boots all trying to use a handful of cans may well be imagined. Can anyone spell "s-t-i-n-k-i-n-g n-i-g-h-t-m-a-r-e?"
One night, a squad of us were called out for guard duty. Before sending us off to our posts, the sergeant delivered a rousing war talk on the deteriorating situation with Red China and how we could expect to see human waves of Commies trying to overrun Lackland any day now. According to the sarge, with appropriate high dudgeon, Red scouts might be prowling the perimeter this very night, looking for a chance to slit our throats.
And so, with those words rattling around in our skulls, and heavily armed with flashlights, we set out to defend the Free World from Chinese Communism. It was probably no more than five minutes after I reached my duty station that I laid down on the ground and fell fast asleep. Communist cutthroats or no Communist cutthroats, there is only so much a body can take after eighteen hours of nonstop punishment--I really didn't care if the Reds overran my position or if the Free World remained free another day. I was, however, deathly afraid of my sergeant. Somewhere in my disturbed dreams, I saw the light of a train as it roared down on me while I lay naked on the track. Almost unconscious, I jumped to my feet.
"Halt . . . who is it? I mean . . . who goes there?"
By the grace of God and the inscrutable crossing of planets, I had avoided the sergeant's flashlight beam and the possibility of being shot at sunrise by the narrowest of margins. Even the fear of death at dawn wasn't enough to deny nature, however. After escaping one close call I eagerly embraced another by falling fast asleep soon after the sergeant left.
No, those thirty days of basic training pretty well convinced me that there would never be a future for me and the military. But I do think it odd that not only do I enjoy reading military histories, but many of my best friends are, or were, professional military men. No sir, I do not dislike the military; just my own Sad Sack role in it.
After the military, this "hero" went on to be a very successful hitchhiker, a so-so college student and a starving artist in New England.
And so, as I approach yet another birthday and yet another Thanksgiving, some thoughts on life, death and irony.
I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.A., November 21, 1947. Since that time I have lived much of my overly long life in places other than Lawrence, other than Kansas, and other than the U.S.A. I am a reformed meat eater, aka as a vegetarian, and have been for maybe 30 years now. That aside, whenever I am in Lawrence (about 20 miles from my home here in Topeka), I am extremely careful where I walk and how I drive, especially at this momentous time of year (I was in Lawrence last week and was very, very chary). Of the bazillion places to die, Lawrence is the last place on earth I want that dreaded event to happen. A reoccurring nightmare of mine is this inscription on my tombstone: Born in Lawrence, November 21, 1947; died in Lawrence, November 20, 2047.
"Poor soul," viewers shake their heads in pity as they look down. "To live his entire life in one place without ever leaving. He must have been one miserable mole! Or maybe he was bedridden, or maybe a hermit with 50 cats in his shack!"
My worst fear? To be run over and flat-lined by a meat delivery truck while I am walking across a "Wendy's" parking lot in Lawrence, Kansas, one day short of my hundredth birthday. That, to me, would be the irony from hell.
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Future Car of the Day
In one sense, I am wondrously relieved. Eight years of warmongering, nation-bullying, world-menacing, sanctioned torture, and assorted bomb-dropping on any poor little third-world excuse of a country that does not stoop on bended knee to America, is seemingly over. In eight years, we earned the enmity of the earth. From admired nation, to despised nation; from liked (or laughed at), to feared; the arrogant moron, Bush, smirked his way through it all. His bullheaded incompetence, and the pack of neo-con wolves surrounding him, opened wide to the Democrats the door to the White House. We do not have to wait 20, 50 or a hundred years for the verdict of history; we already know that the Bush presidency is the worst in American history...going away.
I would now like to see a tribunal established in which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Powell, and their Neo-Con Middle-East Zionist "advisers" (read: handlers) of the Paul Wolfawitz and Doug Feith ilk, are put on trial, convicted and punished. Unlike the torture these criminals meted out to helpless captives in Abu Ghraib and other CIA gulags throughout the world, and unlike the slaughter they visited upon tens of thousands around the globe, I would be grateful if these murderous, lying culprits were simply put on some remote and inaccessible island and never ever allowed to disturb the world again.
Now, just because I am grateful this corrupt and bloody Republican regime is soon to be gone (for four years, at least), this does not mean that I am all awash with sunshine, happiness and hope over the election result. I note that the media molders and shapers of American tastes and opinions are already hard at work shining and buffing the image of Saint Obama; soon, when these folks are through with him, he will be as great as Old Abe and George Washington combined. These same agenda-driven media types, the same who have covered for Obama throughout the campaign, will work night and day to make sure he becomes our greatest president of all time, no matter the ugly reality. But I must say, if Obama stops these interminable wars started for the sake of Israel and Israel alone, stops threatening other nations (from Venezuela to Russia), stops illegal immigration and expels the illegal criminals already here, does not ban firearms, does not favor his race over mine, does not tilt us toward bloody Marxism, THEN, I too, will jump on board his bus and praise him. But I am not holding my breath on this one. America, buckle up. It will be a rough ride. We are getting exactly what we deserve. BTW--I opted out of the One-party system (again) and voted for Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate.
Aside: We Americans were so tired of endless war, gratuitous torture, bombastic ignorance, government rot and stench, and world hatred, that we would have voted for a chicken, a goat, a three-headed toad, or the very devil himself, had they promised "Change." Small wonder then, that the country went for a slick, smiling salesman that reminds me of a black Bill Clinton.
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Poster of the Day
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