Word: jonestown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some never find salvation or happiness. San Francisco has the highest suicide rate and one of the highest alcoholism rates in the nation. Despite constant closed-circuit television monitoring, there have been 642 known fatal leaps from the Golden Gate Bridge. Last week, after the horror in Jonestown, the Suicide Prevention Center reported that the number of calls from desperate citizens had increased...
...with testimonies to American visions. And the People's Temple was really no different: it sought the ideal community, too. Like all its American predecessors, it longed to leave aside the past, and the fever of democratic license; but its own absolutism proved self-consuming. The impulse which inspired Jonestown is really no different from that which inspired the Mormons 100 years ago. What has changed is American society: a violent age produces violent events...
...dementia of absolute belief which should be felt as the deepest horror in the Jonestown affair. For out of absolute belief comes the desire to test that belief absolutely; and only when faced with death can the believer know he truly believes. And so, in a twisted way Jones resurrected this task from past movements; and forgetting the past, he and his followers repeated...
...turvy theme of belief triumphing over death runs through all American literature, from Bradford to Hemingway. It is the American's consolation that if he fails with his vision, he can persist in his belief. Perhaps these tendencies sound old and no longer applicable. Well, in a sense the Jonestown tale was sketched out a century ago. Consider Moby Dick: Is not there some deep similarity between Jones and Ahab? Ahab, leading his crew in a suicidal pursuit, testing himself against all the supernatural forces; Jones, carrying his group with him in his strange quest. How did both control their...
...Jonestown's members are even more significant than Jones himself, who was distributed and demonic, yet only one of a thousand. Their normal humanity, not their madness or mindlessness, stands out, their journey with undimmed belief from America and into the jungle. It all leads inexorably and even naturally to final dissolution in some unmapped region--just as the hard-bitten crew of the Pequod rowed fearfully yet willingly under the raging Ahab, to the great white whale, to the end of the absolutist quest. How can we so easily write them...