Thoughts Of Jonestown

35 years ago today, over 900 people died in Guyana in a mass murder-suicide known as the Jonestown Tragedy.

As it happens I know quite a lot about this because I researched a film on the subject. Although I was not effected directly, just knowing the story so well has left a huge footprint in me. This anniversary sends me off into many thoughts.

When I was researching the film nine years ago, I would play the NBC footage (including B-roll) from Guyana over and over again until I could name almost every person in the images --a task which required everything I had gleaned from reading over a dozen books, interviewing people, and the Jonestown Institute's website. I also made a journey to Berkeley CA, where I attended a moving play about the Peoples Temple, sitting in the mezzanine with the Parks family with scores of other survivors all around us. As I recognized the faces and they recognized one another after about 28 years apart, it was like stepping into a strange dream for me.

Here is a memoir I wrote about those experiences.

The website of the Jonestown Institute is the best place to start if you want to seriously understand the story, and I strongly recommend the recent book A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres, that is after already knowing the story as well as I do, before I read it. This book deals with a small, unexplored slice of an absolutely huge tale, but what's important to me is the author's way of talking about what went wrong. Her tone is unsentimental and accurate when she touches on the ethics. For me it's a wild read because I have heard the story from the lips of some of the survivors, but not from members the Bogue or Cordell families, who Julia found and interviewed. I'd turn the pages saying "Oh wow..." because missing pieces of a puzzle were appearing.

For this commemorative blip, I arranged my books on the Peoples Temple, not sure what else I might include. Then Max came along and settled the question. The position of my cat's tail and eyes brought back how sickening it was for me to listen to Jim Jones' voice on tape for perhaps a few hundred hours. It's a very long and complicated story but that man wasn't just a megalomaniac on steroids. He was also a sleaze-bag and a pig.

There is no other story quite like this one. So much hope, so much sorrow, so strange.