Word: jonestown
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...signs of foul play, at least some of the deaths may have been suicides, part of one more episode in cult pathology to put beside the weird tragedies at Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A victim was found with a letter to her family explaining that she had come to Switzerland to die. Jean-Francois Mayer, a Swiss authority on cults, made public three letters he said were posted to him by cult members before the fire. "We are leaving this earth," read one, "to rediscover, lucidly and freely, a dimension of truth and absoluteness...
...success of the Espys and other middle-class blacks is a fragile thing. Welfare payments are the largest source of income in rural areas, greater than King Cotton. The Third World poverty in towns like Tunica (23.5% unemployment) and Jonestown (pop. 1,400, of whom 1,300 are black) is a reminder that civil rights laws alone cannot guarantee opportunity...
...places like these the problems are so basic they seem anachronistic: plumbing, paving and food. Jonestown's energetic Mayor Bobbi Walker is scrounging for $3,000 in private money so the Habitat people will come in and help replace 30 dilapidated shacks. Cotton planting and ginning take only about six months of each year, and there is no other work for the Jonestown families. Yet Mayor Walker and her small cluster plod on. A sewer system will be completed in a few weeks. Running water is now in most homes. She's working to get hot water to every family...
There is in Baghdad the feeling of a huge new Jonestown, with another demented preacher leading his flock to death. The isolation is profound. The awareness of the real world limited. The government of Saddam is deeply paranoiac. Officials read single events as connected by strands of conspiracies. Even the Information Minister, not part of the most powerful circle around Saddam, worries enough about his welfare to have at his side a guard armed with...
...advised him "to read anything I could get my hands on." He started out in Chicago radio, eventually moving to Washington and television, joining CBS in 1971. Six years later, he jumped to ABC, where as Latin American correspondent he covered the Nicaraguan revolution and the mass suicide at Jonestown. In 1980, when CNN asked him to be one of its original anchors, Shaw was torn. Network bosses told him it would ruin his career, but Shaw disagreed. "Murrow was on the threshold of the new age," he reasoned. "I thought that a 24-hour news network...