Word: thousands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...case, when, (if) any snow ever falls, and this year's model December 25th rolls around, the sins of past debauches will be long buried. And as people gather to celebate the birthday of a two thousand year gone heretical Jew, we can easily salve any conscience recoiling from yet another helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After all, at least we're avoiding that spirit of Christmas' past that would demand the consumption of "broke broune, longe flouteurs and payne puff" as but one tenth of our Christmas cheer...
...well. Other expenses include tickets for any guests they wish to bring, and the binding for the previously mentioned photo album. In addition to the official ball, the family may wish to give a private ball of their own. All told, a debut can easily cost over a thousand dollars...
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...
...tendency to join cults seems to come roughly in 50-year cycles in the U.S. A wave broke in the mid-19th century, then again after World War I, and now in the '70s. For several thousand years, the rule has been that cults nourish in times of great social change...
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...