Word: guyana
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...seemed until last week, when the followers of the Rev. Jim Jones--more than 900 of them--downed those cups of cyanide-laced Flavor-aide and promptly died in the jungle of Guyana. In the 11 days since that terrifying event, those deaths (no one will ever really be sure whether they were all suicides, or whether some drank the poison at gunpoint) have stolen the world's attention away from less exotic, less titillating news. In short, the Jonestown affair has become the most publicized spot-news event since Richard Nixon's resignation, with every form of media jumping...
Brief, staccato bursts of things everyone fears but is unable to do anything about appeared in Guyana last week. The events rankled of third-world terrorism, possible mercenary involvement (in the airstrip murders), government corruption and laziness, both on the part of Guyana and the United States. The presence of conspiracy-man Mark Lane as Jones's attorney, warning that Ryan's investigation would have disastrous results, even adds heat to the conspiracy theories. One gets the nagging feeling that all of these seemingly random things are tied up somehow, but in fact they aren't, at least...
LAST WEEK'S surrealistic nightmares from the jungles of Guyana have once again put the issue of religious cults squarely in the center of the American stage. In a way that the scattered rumors of mind control and depersonalization among Moonies and Hare Krishna devotees could not, Guyana deaths have focused U.S. public attention on the cults and on the question of what the cults are all about, why people join them, and what import this movement has for our society...
...This leaves little more than a small lunatic fringe in defense of the cults; Mark Lane, famous for conjuring conspiracies and playing games with committees attempting real investigations into recent U.S. political assassinations, was busy defending Jim Jones of the People's Temple when all hell broke loose in Guyana...
...East; we may simply be watching the aftermath of a million LSD trips and the casting-about of a hundred million turned-off, disillusioned people; but clearly Something Big is happening, and by refusing to take it seriously except when it leads to such macabre events as the Guyana massacre we are quite possibly missing the boat on the most crucial historical event of our lifetime. Wake up America, your children are chanting in the living room, and it isn't Rock of Ages...