ghostweed (press)
books and music

news
get the haps
music
peruse our fine recordings
books
peruse our fine books
shorts
take a taste test
about
where am i?
contact
get our fine digits
photos
visit the gallery

buy new releases:

where the words go andrea maxand / where the words go


who can we trust to lead us?

(old poll results)

watch intro movies:


andrea maxand /
half a joke



andrea maxand /
bedroom window



greentrials /
some battleground



greentrials /
sweet intentions


buy old releases:

where eaglets dare greentrials / where eaglets dare
matt segur / soft power soft power




(sign in here)


IV. For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat

In 1976, the LA Herald named the Reverend Jim Jones “Humanitarian of the Year.” Fathers of Church and State heralded the People’s Temple. They called it “a very close-knit group of people who really do carry out the admonition of Matthew 25.” They said, “You’d go in if you were in trouble, if you were in need, and they’d take care of you—no questions asked.”

On November 18, 1978, 911 of Jones’ followers living in Jonestown, Guyana died with a few shudders of chemical asphyxiation. They died because they drank from dixie cups filled with a mixture of FlaVorAid and potassium cyanide.

Jimmy Carter, the President of the United States, said, “We don’t need to deplore on a nationwide basis the fact that the Jonestown Cult—so called, was typical of America—because it’s not.” Forbes Burnham, the Prime Minister of Guyana, disagreed: “Essentially, it’s an American problem of these cultists.” The Russian magazine Tass blamed the “American way of life.” The French Le Monde said, “It would have been inconceivable and impossible on American soil. They needed to be uprooted, transported into the heart of the jungle and transformed into convicts of a delirious faith in a Messiah unleashing his instincts of domination and death to become self-destructive robots.”

Journalists and conspiracy theorists blamed the CIA, the Mafia, the Freemasons, the KKK, and the B’nai B’rith. They blamed General Foods. They blamed the delirious Messiah and they blamed the self-destructive robots.

The whole world disowned the People’s Temple and disowned the corpses of its nine hundred members. One Congressman said, “They should have dug a hole in Guyana and bulldozed the whole bunch of them in.” Instead the U.S. Government flew the bodies to an Air Force base in Dover, Delaware. Most of them were never claimed, and the citizens of Delaware wrote letters of protest: “Cremation at sea is a lovely burial rite and ceremony, and, of course, we will not contaminate the landmass of the United States with another quasi-religious temple.”

The members of the People’s Temple had been outcasts to begin with—deadbeats, junkies, geriatrics, blacks and retards—but their bodies were simple contagion. Death transformed them from humanitarians to subhumans. The change was made possible when people demanded an explanation for a thousand blackened bodies strewn around a shoddy farm in South America. They demanded a story, and in stories, things change.

Two weeks into the school year, Scott Setter and I stood waiting for Gabe outside the school. We were going to Scott’s to play Sega. Gabe hadn’t come out the front doors yet, but the school Christian group was gathering. They had a sign-up table hung with a banner made from a white sheet. A couple of the Christian kids were standing behind the table, but nobody was paying them any attention.

There was a boombox on the table playing some Christian rock. A guy was singing about how he needed nothing but Jesus. It sounded like a bunch of ordinary sentences that someone had strung together with notes—mostly the same two notes. The cadence of the words wasn’t right. It was like they weren’t even trying.

I looked down on the Christian kids. They made it easy with their Christian rock, Christian rap, and Christian events. It was all meant to draw people in, but you’d have to be truly, deeply pathetic to be taken in by any of that. The kids in the Christian group were the kids nobody liked—nobody at all—who weren’t good at anything. Of course those kids wanted to believe their reward was coming in the next life. It was obvious it wasn’t coming in this one—as obvious to them as it was to everybody else. Of course they wanted to believe God loved them. It was obvious no one else did.

One of them was a kid named Roger, with blond white hair and pale white skin. He was sitting at the table like he expected someone to run up and punch him in the face. He always looked like that. What kind of name was Roger anyway? Nobody was named Roger anymore—his parents must have been as out of it as he was. The other was a girl I didn’t know, but she looked even more timid than Roger.

Gabe finally came out and we left the Christians behind. We walked toward Scott’s house. “What’s the funniest Bible story, you think?”

“Moneychangers!” Scott lived only a few blocks from the school, so when we went anywhere it was usually to his house.

I said that I liked when the lady got turned into a pillar of salt.

“Moneychangers! It’s totally moneychangers!”

We were walking along the dry sewage ditch at the side of the road. Gabe said, “Shut up,” and shoved Scott in the ditch. Scott went along toggling the red flags on all the mailboxes, and Gabe said, “I think the funniest was when Jesus Christ got crucified.”

“Aw, man.” Scott was the only one of the three of us that still had to go to church. “That was only funny the first time.”

The Reverend Jim Jones didn’t care for religion. He found his first congregation in a used car lot in Indiana. When he heard the owner was a Methodist Superintendent he started badmouthing the Church just to get a rise out of him. The Methodist invited Jim Jones into his office. “I thought, ‘You fucker I’m not coming to your god-damn office.’ But I did, for some instinctive reason I went. He said, ‘I want you to take a church.’ I said, ‘You giving me a church? I don’t believe in anything. I’m a revolutionary.’ He appointed me, a fucking communist, to a god-damned church. I take this god-damned church as a communist who believed in nothing—that is how religious I was and still am.”

The Reverend Jim Jones was a revolutionary. Sometimes he said God up in the sky was like a buzzard, feeding on His people. Sometimes he talked about God almighty, Socialism. Sometimes he himself was God. Sometimes he was just a man with supernatural powers. Sometimes he was a man who put on a show, like the Wizard of Oz.

If people needed a God, he could be their God. If they needed faith healing, he would heal them. If they needed to see him return from the dead after being shot, that was what he’d do. As long as it got them where they needed to be: in his church. He based his interracial ministry on his own role as a living God, fashioning his church after the Peace Mission founded during the Depression by M.J. “Father” Divine, who had preached, “Because your God would not feed the people, I came and I am feeding them. Because your God kept such as you segregated and discriminated, I came and I am unifying all nations together.”

He put on a healing show to bring in a black audience. They displaced the white congregation, and Jim Jones didn’t care. He wanted people of all races in his church. He wanted old people and poor people. His church raised money and gave it to schools in black communities, they brought groceries to people who couldn’t get their own, and they campaigned for candidates who would look out for the poor. He got George Moscone elected. If you were going to stage a rally or protest, you could call Jim Jones and hundreds of people would show up courtesy of the People’s Temple. He called himself Nigger Jones. He used white to mean “bad,” and black to mean “good.”

He called the night those nine hundred people died a white night.

When we got to Scott’s place, the Sega was busted. We all trooped down to the basement, pushing past each other to get one of the two controllers. I jabbed the TV and the Sega on. The TV whistled and warmed from black, but the image that came up was mangled and out of place. I recognized pieces here and there, but the colors were all pink and weird. I rushed to turn it off because I imagined it destroying itself like a melting reel of film. Scott said it couldn’t hurt and he tried it again, but it was the same every time.

“Damn, Setter. Nice Sega.”

“Weird. Maybe the cat peed on it. He likes to, for some reason.”

“We could go back and join the Jesus people.”

He had a ping-pong table in his basement. We tried to play ping-pong, but all the balls were cracked and they didn’t bounce right. So we just sat there on the dirty couch with the springs that went up your ass. We stared at the dark red carpeting that covered the concrete floor.

“Can we see the bird?”

Scott’s brother had a falcon. It was in a cage in his room under a blanket. It would sleep as long as the blanket was there because it thought that made it night. “My brother would kick my ass,” Scott said.

“He won’t get back for another hour. I always used to snoop around my sister’s room right after I got home. They don’t get out for another hour.”

“It doesn’t even do anything. It’s just a bird.”

“It’s better than your Sega and your ping-pong table. Or is it broken, too? Did its beak fall off? Is that why you don’t want to show it to us? Your house kind of sucks.”

“Then why don’t we go look around your sister’s room?”

“My sister doesn’t have any falcons.”

“Your sister’s totally hot.”

“That’s great, Scott.”

“No I’m serious. It’s true right Aleks?”

I didn’t want to annoy Gabe, so I just mumbled, “I dunno.” She was a year older than Scott’s brother. She was working for a year, saving up money to go to college. I hadn’t seen her since the year before, but sometimes when we were hanging around Gabe’s house she’d show up in bare feet and torn jeans. She always seemed to be eating something sugary, but her torn jeans were still tiny. They were tight around her slender legs.

“Come on Aleks admit it, it’s true.”

“He already said he didn’t know.”

“He’s just being nice. She’s hot, right Aleks?”

“Shut up!”

I gave up. “She kind of is, yeah.”

Gabe rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying.”

“Hey speaking of that, you know how Mr. Forman had us doing those stupid relay races in gym today?”

“Don’t try to change the subject. We’re talking about your sister.”

“Shut up sooo much.” Gabe turned away from Scott. “So I was sitting there in the bleachers while the girls were doing their relay, and Jenie Berman got the baton and ran to the opposite side of the gym, and then she turned around and while she was running back her boobs were just crazy bouncing up and down—like so much it looked painful. And Ken Duffy stood up and started stamping on the bleachers and shouting ‘Yeah!’”

I looked over at Scott, who was sitting against the ping-pong table laughing. “What’d Mr. Forman do?”

“He didn’t do anything. He just ignored the whole thing. She didn’t say anything either.”

Scott pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged on the table. “Wouldn’t that be weird if you had to show up at school one day with these big boobs?”

Nobody answered him.

“What would you do? It’d be like when you get new sneakers or something.”

“I’d probably leave them at home, at least until they got a little roughed-up and not so shiny white.”

“Yeah really.”

“Oh and Aleks listen to this: in Physical Science while we were working on that lab, totally out of nowhere, Eric DeCarta—”

Scott burst out laughing.

“—in this really loud voice he suddenly says—”

In unison, Gabe and Scott shouted, “Man, I’m way too hung for these pants!”

The Reverend Jim Jones was a fan of Huey Newton’s book Revolutionary Suicide. Huey Newton said later that he hadn’t meant it like that. He meant to distinguish revolutionary suicide from reactionary suicide. Reactionary suicides were not just the literal suicides but everyone who abandoned hope: alcoholics, druggies, and petty criminals. Revolutionary suicides died before they broke. The two choices were exhaustive; that you ended up a suicide was never in doubt; the only question was how. “The first thing the revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”

On January 1, 1976, Jones gathered thirty temple members together for a white night. He warned them about enemies of the church in the United States. They drank a glass of wine together, and then he told them the wine had been poisoned.

But there was no poison. “It was a good lesson,” Jones said. “I see you’re not dead.” He conducted not one but seven of these suicide drills. The members of the People’s Temple didn’t mind the idea of dying.

“I don’t understand people wanting to live anyway.”

“It would be fun to die.”

“It would be better to die and get it over with.”

The Reverend Jim Jones’ first congregation in Indiana moved to Ukiah, California. They became the People’s Temple. They opened an office in San Francisco where they did most of their humanitarian work. But Jim Jones’ fears of meddling and nuclear holocaust convinced him to move again, to Jonestown, Guyana. He wanted to create a self-sufficient community. The People’s Temple Agricultural Project raised cassava, cutlass beans, goats and chickens. A thousand Americans living in the jungle in Guyana worked to feed, house, and entertain each other. They held dances. They listened to Radio Moscow.

“It’s fantastic to hear what’s going on in the world, the very opposite of what it was in the States where they just told you a bunch of crap all the time about what you needed to buy.”

A group called Concerned Relatives spoke out against all the good press. They were former members and relatives of members. They said the Temple held people against their will. They called Jim Jones a brainwasher and a tyrant. Jim Jones called them jilted meddlers bent on destroying the Temple. It was because of the Concerned Relatives that Congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana on November 17, 1978, the day before the final white night. He was at the head of a congressional investigation into the Temple.

No one knows how all the Temple’s members felt, but many of them shared Jones’ desire for escape. “I’m no longer afraid. I’ve lost interest in the whole world of capitalist sin. I’d just as soon bring it to a gallant, glorious, screaming end, a screeching stop in one glorious moment of triumph.”

The moment of triumph began when Congressman Ryan and his delegation were ambushed at the Kaituma airstrip and killed. Jones’ mercenaries slit the throats of a family that had tried to defect. 911 Temple members drank cyanide. Three died from bullet wounds.

Months later, a lawyer for the Temple called a press conference in a hotel room in Modesto, California. His name was Michael Prokes, and he had survived the white night because at the time he was working in San Francisco.

“Through the Temple,” he said, “I understood what it meant to be black and old and poor in this society.

“The Temple was making tremendous achievements in terms of human rehabilitation and improvement in the quality of peoples’ lives and character.

“I can’t dissociate myself from those people who died, nor do I want to.”

He excused himself from the press conference, went into the bathroom, and shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol.

Scott’s brother Ryan got home after about an hour. We were still sitting on the pokey couch when he came down the stairs to get something from the dryer.

“What are you guys doing?”

“The Sega broke.”

“You broke the Sega?”

“No we didn’t break it. It just broke.”

“Yeah, ok. It ‘just broke.’ How did it ‘just break’?”

“We don’ know dicknock! We just turned it on and it wasn’t working.”

“Maybe the cat peed on it.”

The basement was dirty and dark. The only light came through the high grungy windows and hit the couch between me and Gabe.

“You weren’t messing with Orclos were you?”

“No, we weren’t messing with your stupid bird.”

“So you’ve just been sitting here, doing nothing, just cause the Sega’s broken?”

“Yeah, so?”

“You guys are losers. No wonder you can’t get girlfriends. I’m gonna listen to music. Stay out of my room.”

He went back up the stairs. Gabe and I looked at each other, and Gabe looked at Scott. “Hey, you know how your brother and my sister used to be in the same math class?”

Scott looked up. “Yeah?”

“Did I ever tell you that she told me one time they all looked in his notebook while he was in the bathroom, and it was full of drawings of falcons, guys with swords, and dicks?”


chapter 5 - in which N*Sync is dealt with

( previous chapter | table of contents | introduction )


©2001-2024 GHOSTWEED (PRESS)