Word: jims
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...PARTICULARLY interesting facet of the Jonestown affair is that it involved many of the vague, somehow threatening phenomena and mindsets that characterize fringe groups in America today. The very embodiment of this, of course, was the Rev. Jim Jones, a peculiarly American product. So many details of his bizarre life have emerged in the past week that most people are probably tired of him already, but for others the fascination, albeit morbid, remains. Here was a man who managed to combine and warp good impulses by way of a twisted psyche...
Worse still is the political tool the People's Temple had become before many of its members left California. Jim Jones became the late George Moscone's Housing Authority Commissioner in San Francisco two years ago because he could, on six hours' notice, produce two or three thousand obedient bodies to flesh out a campaign rally or go door-to-door with literature. His services apparently went to the politico willing to do the most in return. Jones could deliver, even if his political army was somehow reminiscent of Nixon's Youth in 1972, that wonderful army that would begin...
...Jim goes pretty much by what Mr. Bate has done. They are constantly in touch," said Penny P. Merliss, a teaching fellow for the course...
...analysis is suspect if it conjoins such disparate groups as the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, the practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, the Jesus freaks, Scientology, est, the newfound devotees of Oriental religions in the U.S. like Sufi or Zen Buddhism, and the followers of individual cult leaders like Jim Jones or Guru Maharaj Ji. But since academic sociologists refuse to take these groups seriously enough to study them, the general ignorance on the whole matter may be lightened by a few generalized stabs in the dark...