The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS The cause of social justice in America suffered an incalculable setback when two truly devoted progressives lost their lives in midNovember. I speak of the inscrutable...
...Washington was unusually quiet...
...None of the pols' bromides applied to an atrocity where so many of their fashionable illusions had so luridly blown up, and our leaders are too empty to think for themselves...
...For if the truth be known, as with so many of our era's radicals, the good Rev...
...Sober liberals have warned of the flight from reason and the implicit coercion of the enduring 1960s gauchisme...
...I speak of the inscrutable "Jonestown Mishap...
...The Temple, "dedicated against the evils of racism, hunger, and injustice," was, as Rep...
...Thus it must have been a sunny day for them when the November 29 New York Times printed a story whose headline read "Doctor Sees Danger In Cult Survivors' Deep Depression...
...Leo J. Ryan, the threeterm congressman murdered at a remote Guyana airstrip midst a mob of TV cameramen, TV reporters, photographers, writers, technicians, foreign service personnel, aides, and lawyers...
...The Hon...
...Finally a beam of light-the Jonestown Mishap will be made right by Joe Califano...
...The good man reintroduced the bastinado and punitive rape...
...One of those needs was the need for discipline, and the good Rev...
...What restrains tough journalists from calling this ferocious hater a Marxist or a Communist or a left-wing fanatic...
...For years they have twisted the meanings of words and events...
...The poor loons maundered on about their dread of "the capitalist U.S...
...Thus it comes as no surprise that these two fine men would come to the defense of the humanitarian founder of Jonestown, the Rev...
...Other needs met by the Temple were the good Rev.'s need for sex, drugs, and Cadillacs...
...Yet the thing blew up, and in the most ghastly way...
...Solzhenitsyn could explain the meaning of Jonestown, but our pols would scowl...
...First to go was Rep...
...Bella Abzug, the Hon...
...Here is a man responsible for the largest nongovernmental mass murder in centuries...
...The thousands of letters written to him by members of his flock and found after his holocaust contained no fragrance of Christianity or even humanism...
...Garry that he has been legal counsel for the Communist Party of the U.S.A...
...Yet no major media voice so far as I have been able to ascertain has called them Communists...
...Clearly they have none, yet they are too lost in political fantasies to notice...
...The Hon...
...Jones fattened as his struggles against hunger and injustice gained momentum...
...The good Rev...
...He had come to disdain the Good Book, and to extol only a very restricted collection of luminaries: Lenin, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, Dr...
...Yet our bovine sophisticates and ritualistic liberals merely shrugged and went on to prosper on the cheap sentimentalism, the meaningless rhetoric, and the profligate programs of the era...
...Ryan was in his element...
...For over a decade fussy conservatives have been warning of the zealotry of the 1960s, the utopianism, the ecstasy, the unrealistic expectations...
...Their earlier clients have included such thoughtful liberals as Mr...
...Jones often ordered that electrodes be attached to the bodies of wayward children...
...What sinister force induced Rep...
...Joe will relieve the survivors' depression and bring them above the poverty line...
...The Jonestown Mishap abounded with 1960s moonshine right down to the moral exhibitionist flying in from Capitol Hill surrounded by cameramen and activist lawyers...
...Syntactically that is a curious formulation, but perhaps it was written in accordance with a new HEW regulation forbidding the use of sentences...
...Illustrative of the vacuity of our pols was their response to the Jonestown Mishap...
...He had incarcerated himself for eight days in Folsom prison...
...When the congressman died three newsmen went along...
...Mike Gravel, and our beloved First Lady, who wrote him that his "comments about Cuba are helpful...
...No Bible-pounder ever seen has had such a list of ideological horrors...
...They never faced up to the violence of the 1960s, and they are not going to face up to it as it now appears in its most gruesome form...
...Earlier he had pothered around in an impoverished Watts household, experiencing black poverty firsthand...
...Jones' Marxist whim-wham, sirens went off in the craniums of the keepers of fashionable opinion...
...And then there was a peregrination to Newfoundland, where he was photographed smiling balmily into the muzzle of a near hysterical seal pup...
...Jones, who had in 1963 been director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission and who later was made chairman of San Francisco's Housing Authority, went to the jungle in 1977 to escape nuclear calamity, capitalism, the CIA, the FBI, and the concentration camps that he was sure the United States was building for him...
...HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano-himself a non-smoker and an advocate of radical redistribution -wrote that "those who are most familiar with the work of the People's Temple...speak glowingly of the numerous social programs your church has established in meeting every type of human need...
...He actually admired the Soviet Unionnot Mao's China but Papa Brezhnev's Russiaand he apparently longed to move his menagerie to the great workers' paradise...
...It was another of those "news stories" from which all would prosper...
...What stake do our ritualistic liberals believe they have in keeping the word Marxism unsullied and insulated from ugly news stories...
...Why was this mode of nonviolent protest not thought of earlier...
...One sees him stretched out in the quarters of his tropical redoubt, worriedly reading back issues of the Nation, or Mother Jones, or Consumer Reports, while ingesting vast quantities of peach ice cream-another of his human needs...
...He has probably just killed more blacks than the Ku Klux Klan...
...Nonetheless it is doubtful that even the good Marxist government of Guyana would go as far as the August 1973 Washington Post editorial which stated: "The hands-down winners of anybody's tourists-of-the-year award lave got to be the 660 members of the Peoples Temple...who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived...
...and their adoration of "Communism...
...So successful have they been at denaturing language and action that now we live in an utterly meaningless era, a time in which those who most stentoriously speak of love and justice either mean something entirely different or nothing at all...
...Skeptics have snickered at the devotees of love, compassion, and social justice whose violent behavior and oratory so fulsomely put the lie to their angelic claims...
...Jim Jones, a champion of such liberal causes as disarmament, black militancy, the class struggle, the anti-smoking ban, and the 1960s love ethos...
...RET...
...Castro, the late Adolf, and one or two more...
...He was the paradigmatic 1960s Dawnist liberal, always shuffling off to observe firsthand some suffering situation, always bobbing about in a sea of cameras and microphones, always welcoming the dawn of some breathtaking new era...
...It also cashed their social security checks, expeditiously disposed of their property, and featured boxing matches pitting disobedient children against a 200-pound woman wearing weighted boxing gloves...
...Indeed one reads the long catalogue of concerns fevering the good man-the militaryindustrial-complex, the giant corporations, institutional racism, capitalism, American imperialism-and one wonders why the news reports continued to call him a "fundamentalist preacher...
...that "knowing of your congregation's deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me...
...For on November 18 the good Rev...
...Huey Newton and Miss Angela Davis, and so progressive is Mr...
...Ryan was in Guyana investigating unseemly rumors regarding the tropical commune of the People's Temple, "an interracial sharing community" based in San Francisco...
...The good Rev...
...It is as though, despite the evidence of Mein Kampf, the Nuremberg Marches, World War II, and Auschwitz, our media continued to call Herr Hitler an Austrian artist or an Austrian orator...
...Starting at an early age, children were bound and dropped down wells or hung upside down in the jungle overnight...
...Vice President Mondale, after a 1976 powwow on his campaign plane, wrote the Rev...
...got edgy and auspicated a social protest that left over 900 corpses in Jonestown, a "socialist agrarian experiment...
...Most of our leaders are humbugs or chuckleheads...
...Califano went on to observe: "Knowing your commitment and compassion, your interest in protecting individual liberty and freedom have made an outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of human dignity...
...The Movement," in all its protean manifestations, went on bashing conventional America and learning nothing...
...Ryan to barge in on this incomparably progressive community remains a mystery, but activist lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry sniffed the nefarious CIA, and down to scenic Guyana they did go...
...Break out the social workers...
...Jones had moved to Guyana from San Francisco where in the late 1960s and early 1970s his message of love-peace-justicefederal-grants had saved many souls, introduced him to the services of Swiss bankers, and earned him friendship and laudations from some of the most compassionate, albeit toughminded, politicians of our era...
...Christ and his colleagues were wholly missing from his galaxy of heroes...
...And apparently "The Movement" and its sympathizers still have learned nothing...
...They apparently feared that his association with integration and social causes would discredit both and give the country over to Kluxery and a new generation of Robber Barons...
...Ryan astutely observed before being- gunned down, "the best thing" that had ever happened to its melange of poor blacks and aging flower children...
...As reporters wired back stories of the good Rev...
...He has done it under the doctrine of the most murderous ideology in history, and the thing is to be sanitized...
...At any rate this remarkable humanitarian also had in his possession testimonials from such other forward-lookers -as Governor Jerry Brown, the Hon...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
