Note: This piece is adapted from Eugene Smith’s memoir Back to the World: A Life after Jonestown, published earlier this year by TCU Press. I was Eugene’s collaborator, and I consider Back to the World perhaps the most important book that I’ve ever had the privilege to work on. Today is the 43rd anniversary of the mass murder-suicide of Peoples Temple members at Jonestown, Guyana. Back to the World can be purchased directly from the publisher here or via Amazon here. - Ethan Casey, Publisher, Blue Ear Books
Other reading:
“I Am a Survivor of the Jonestown Massacre” by Eugene Smith, published today in Newsweek
An excellent short interview with Eugene Smith (text) by Samuel Getachew for KQED radio, San Francisco
“The last apartheid president: FW de Klerk” by Andrew Russell, published in this newsletter on Nov. 11
For many years after I lost my mother, wife, and infant son in the Nov. 18, 1978 mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, I spoke to no one about it. I was angry, and it was none of anyone’s business. Soldiers go to war and come home, and they don’t talk about their experiences. They come back and that’s the end of it, and they hold it in for the rest of their lives. And that’s what I did. But the Jonestown anniversary would come around every year on Nov. 18, and people would make “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” jokes, which infuriated me.
There’s a video clip that shows up in a lot of documentaries, that shows the Rev. Jim Jones himself giving a tour of the Jonestown food stocks and pointing out a box of Kool-Aid packets. We did have some Kool-Aid at Jonestown for the kids, but we really couldn’t afford Kool-Aid in bulk. We bought Flavor Aid, which I thought of as welfare Kool-Aid, for about half the price. I know, because it was my job to clear supplies for Jonestown with customs in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. That’s how I managed to avoid dying in Jonestown: I was in Georgetown on that day. When people say “Drink the Kool-Aid,” it infuriates me, because we couldn’t even actually afford Kool-Aid.
Kool-Aid was in every ad and on every TV commercial back then: the smiley face of Kool-Aid. Now it’s a catchphrase, like, “You’re an idiot, you’re stupid, you’re programmed. You can’t think for yourself.” When I hear people say “Drink the Kool-Aid,” it’s almost like “Drink ignorance.” It infuriates me. It angers me. It disgusts me. It’s a low moment in the thought process of Americans. It makes me despise the person who said it. People don’t understand the hurt behind it. Let’s just say that it was Kool-Aid, and they drank it. What gives you the right to make light of that? They didn’t do it because they wanted to. They were forced, they were coerced, and they were tricked.
People say it with bravado, like, “I know this.” No, you don’t. You listened to some media like forty years ago that said, “Oh, there was a big vat of Kool-Aid.” That was the only thing they could associate it with, at the time. I don’t blame them, but I do blame people who don’t read or think. They’re like, “I didn’t like them anyway. They drank the Kool-Aid.” It’s a catchphrase. It’s in the lexicon of American language. It’s going to be here for decades to come. It should be, for Americans, “Don’t drink the bullshit.”
I know you wonder about this, because I always say “the Americans,” as if like, “Well, what are you?” Well, I’m an American that’s left the country and looked back at it multiple times in my life, from multiple countries and multiple continents, and it ain’t the beautiful thing we think it is. Americans have the capacity to be vicious with a laugh behind it. I’ve never been able to grasp that: how Americans can laugh at death and then be appalled when somebody else does the same thing they themselves do.