Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

The news media of late presents an even more skewed view than usual of the state of our institutions of higher learning.

The current skirmish in the culture wars concerns the reaction of a handful of activist students and professors to the war in Gaza.  If all your news diet consists of Fox News, pro-Palestinian activism and incidents such as the occupation at Columbia and a scattering of other, mostly private universities are rampant throughout American higher ed.  If I am to believe the clickbait headlines in my newsfeed, all of the commie elitist professors on every single campus in the country are indoctrinating all of their students in a woke orthodoxy which, if unchecked by loyal Americans, will result in the destruction of Israel.

This reportage is a cynical ploy by right wing news outlets to further polarize the electorate ahead of November’s election by appealing to the prejudices of their audience.  Tapping into festering resentments across a vocal segment of the public is profitable.  Pigeonholing anyone with any schooling beyond twelfth grade as an out of touch elitist with a head filled with useless “knowledge” is a good media strategy.

Like Fox’s audience, my only experience with the protests is what I watch and read.  The campuses where I work have been quiet.  The topics of Israel, Gaza, and Hamas are largely unmentioned by my students and I have only touched upon them in passing as they are largely tangential to the subjects I teach.  This goes to show that the people most agitated about what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis are on the fringes while the people most affected get lost in the ideological dogma of others.

Let’s begin with the campus protestors.  Let’s stipulate that the events of October 7^th and beyond have been horrific for those affected on both sides.  Having said this, the rhetoric wielded by the pro-Palestinian activists is disturbingly pro-Hamas.  It seems they are blind to the implications of “From the river to the sea.”  Quick to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, they are explicitly advocating the genocide of Israeli Jews.  Their behavior towards their critics or even towards anyone outside the group is also couched in rhetorical excess, branding them as “Zionists” without regard to the person or the arguments posed.

Now on to the cultural warriors of the right.  Unwilling to brook any criticism of Israeli policies or actions, they brand any critics as “anti-semites” who seek an end to Israel.  They willfully ignore Netanyahu’s heavy-handed policies in the West Bank and his ill-fated abandonment of Gaza to Hamas rule.  There doesn’t seem to be any questioning of the intelligence failures which led to the October 7^th attacks.  (Considering that the attacks coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—another intelligence failure—one would think Netanyahu, his advisors, and the Israeli intelligence establishment would have been more alert.)   The delusional worldview of evangelicals for whom Israel’s existence brings us one step closer to the End Times has taken on a cult-like status across the political right, further polarizing the discourse.

The overflow effect on domestic policy has been to put American higher education in the crosshairs even more so than usual.  The focus has been upon “elite” institutions but the larger targets are colleges and universities across the board.  Conservatives want to replace so-called political correctness, which is not nearly as prevalent as charged, with their own orthodoxy.  Calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, coming on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president after her congressional testimony on campus activism, is calculated to create a chilling effect.  Calls for cutbacks of humanities and social science courses and their replacement with more vocational curricula are another front in the right-wing war on academia. The limited scope activism that has the right in a lather is merely a convenient opportunity for them to advance their anti-intellectual agenda.  For them, Israel is beside the point.  The war in Gaza is a convenient opportunity, nothing more.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Interface

It has been many weeks since Mr. Bear last strolled the neighborhood.

Mr. Bear is, well, a bear.  I didn’t name him; my neighbor did.  Each visit from Mr. Bear followed the same pattern.  About an hour after dusk, the neighbor’s dog would start barking.  The porch light would come on, and my neighbor would lean over her deck railing shouting, “No! No, Mr. Bear!  Go away!”  The name stuck in my mind.

Bur anthropomorphizing wildlife is problematic.  My mountain community is at the wildland-urban interface, a potential hazard to both existing ecosystems and the humans encroaching upon them.  My neighbors are bemused by the ursine incursions each autumn, and the foraging animals pose little immediate threat aside from the occasional ransacking of an unoccupied vacation cabin or car whose flatlander owners foolishly left food inside.  But the critters are just one cause for concern.

This region is deceptively picturesque.  The legions of tourists who arrive in the wake of every snowfall ski and snowboard with nary a thought of its occasionally brutal natural history.  Less than a mile from where I sit, a wagon train of settlers stranded by an especially harsh winter lost more than forty of their number to starvation and exposure nearly 175 years ago.  But increasingly it’s been the sparseness of snowfall around these parts that has become troublesome.

I’ve lived up here about twenty years.  The first ten winters were fairly predictable. We would get moderate snowfall from late October through late December, with a week or two to recover between storms.  As one might expect, January and February brought more frequent weather systems and heavier snowfall.  March and April would see a tapering off, though snow in May wasn’t unheard of.  We had to cancel final exams and postpone commencement at the end of one spring semester because a storm had made the roads impassable.

What constitutes a normal winter now is hard to describe.  The snowfalls of 2017-2019 were normal; every other year since 2011 has seen drought conditions.  Last winter was comparatively dry, and yet we had light snowfall the first week of June (the Sunday before summer session began).  Even the summers have brought atypical weather, with windstorms, lightning, and the occasional heavy downpour. 

And then there is fire season, which promises to become a year-round thing with the unusual number of dry winters we’ve had.  Even the good winters of late brought ample rainfall at the lower elevations, which in turn provided fuel in the form of vegetation growth.  The 2017 Napa Valley fire and the horrific 2018 Camp Fire are the shape of things to come.  Some of my neighbors’ insurers agree and have refused to renew their home insurance policies.

My town and the surrounding area haven’t experienced a large-scale wildfire in nearly a century.  We’re about due; it’s a matter of time.  The community’s prepared, at least according to plan. 

But plans seldom come off in an actual emergency.  If a wildfire of the scale and speed of that which ravaged Paradise struck my town, we would see a similar outcome.  My homeowner’s association has put together an evacuation plan in conjunction with the local authorities, which is undoubtedly doomed to failure if put to the test.

I know this from an incident a couple of years ago.  I was going out of town, and I intended to leave early ahead of a major snowstorm.  So did the hordes of flatlanders who had come up for the weekend without consulting the weather forecast.  I live on a side street just off the main drag, which in turn connects to the interstate.  As I loaded my luggage into my car, I noticed a very unusual sight for my lightly trafficked lane. 

It was a long line of stationary cars.  Walking to the end of the driveway, I saw that the traffic jam extended up the street for as far as I could see.  The highway patrol was metering westbound traffic entering the freeway.  The airport I was departing from was 40 miles in the opposite direction everyone else was going, so if I could just make to the main street I’d have it made.  Not having a choice, I got into the car and joined the line.

A half hour later, we had moved less than a hundred feet.  As the wait dragged on, I eventually lost patience.  I’m usually a cautious driver, but cautious wasn’t going to cut it in this situation.  I turned out of the idle line of cars and raced down the shoulder to the intersection.  As soon as I saw a momentary gap in the crosstraffic, I jackrabbited a quick left turn and was finally on my way. 

I later read that many of the out of towners spent that night in their cars, which brings me back to my hypothetical wildfire.  After what I saw during that winter storm, I’m skeptical that the authorities could successfully evacuate the town ahead of a fast-moving firestorm.  The egress routes are too few.  I foresee a repeat performance of the Camp Fire: Some will get away by car, others will flee on foot, and others will be fatally trapped. 

The prospect of disaster is not enough to motivate me to leave, though.  No place on earth is free of risk.  Climate change is making the magnitude of many of these hazards worse, however.  Our inaction on this crisis stems from the seemingly piecemeal, scattered nature of its attendant disasters.  A Florida hurricane causing many millions of dollars in damage is unfortunate, but I don’t experience its effects here on the West Coast any more than drought and wildfire here affect Floridians.  It’s hard to tie such geographically localized phenomena to a single cause, even to those of us who are not denialists.  Barring a sudden, single, widespread catastrophe, we are unlikely to see a concerted effort in this country to address the climate predicament in the foreseeable future. 

In the meantime, I wait at home on the edge of the wild warily watching a changing world.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Distancing

It looks as if we’ll have to spend a few more weeks holding our distance. 

The White House has extended the social distancing period through the end of April as COVID-19 infection rates soar and the death toll mounts.  So much for business as usual by Easter.

Aside from the drawbacks of “remote instruction,” to use the fashionable euphemism for teaching while campuses remain shut, my day-to-day is similar to that of summer.  It’s no hardship staying in.  I have enough food on hand, I’m getting enough sleep, and I don’t have to commute. 

Which doesn’t mean I’m not following the rapidly developing narrative surrounding COVID-19 or am unaffected by it.  I know I’m okay having self-isolated for over two weeks.  I am very thankful that no students or colleagues have tested positive (at least as far as I’m aware).  Our county of just under 100,000 residents has only a dozen confirmed cases as of yesterday and no deaths to date.  Our community hospital assures us it can meet the challenge posed by the outbreak.  But what we’re reading in the news, not to mention listening to the ominous drumbeat of the 24-hour TV news cycle, is enough to wear the strongest nerves.

A month’s worth of cautious self-assurance that we will weather the crisis and move forward all the stronger is beginning to wane.  My reluctance to venture out is growing.  I’ve postponed shopping for today’s wants in favor of actual needs down the way.  Even a week ago I would have said I wanted to stay home to avoid other people’s craziness rather than the coronavirus itself.  Now I’m planning my next outing to make as few stops as necessary, to buy packaged and canned goods rather than fresh produce, and then to go straight home and wash my hands.  Thoroughly.

And yet, there are many signs of normalcy.  Neighbors come and go.  One story in my newsfeed offered that 2/3 of us are still showing up for their “essential” jobs.  I live near an interstate, and in the middle of the night I can hear semi traffic in the distance.  (Another story in my feed quotes over-the-road truckers as saying they’re working more efficiently now there are fewer cars on the roads.  That means retail outlets are surely being stocked. Someone should tell the toilet paper hoarders.)

But in the midst of all this are the numbers.  Dr. Fauci’s prediction that 200,000 may die in the U.S., the ventilator and testing kit shortages, and the swath the disease is cutting in the hardest hit places like Italy and Iran ratchet anxieties. 

The media provide mixed signals which contribute to the confusion.  Local news broadcasts are as chipper as ever.  Commercials still run for businesses those affected by shelter in place orders can’t patronize, automakers still try to sell us new cars and insurers car insurance, and TV programming remains its inane self.  On the other hand, the “shelter in place” installments of The Daily Show, purportedly recorded from the homes of Trevor Noah and other cast members, fall a bit flat trying to wrest humor from current events.  (The past couple of weeks have reinforced my belief that standup and sketch comedy only work in front of a live audience.)

So, it’s pretty tough right now to know what to think or feel.  Then again, some people are quite certain as to how to react.  Although my mountain resort town has respectfully urged visitors to stay away, feedback from other communities in the region indicates a more aggressive stance.  People in one town are pressuring law enforcement to set up checkpoints on the roads leading in.  A Facebook post suggested slashing the tires of out of town cars.  One local official told a reporter she was afraid someone was going to get shot given the xenophobia prevalent in her county.

As far as they’re concerned, the folks coming uphill won’t be kept from the second homes on which they pay taxes.  One part time resident who couldn’t leave her high-powered gig to shelter out here offered her place on Airbnb, advertising it as a place the prospective guest could wait out the crisis in safety.  The listing was quickly taken down after a backlash.

The official who worried people might get shot isn’t being dramatic or alarmist.  In my state, gun shop owners have demanded the governor classify them as essential workers, with the vocal support of assorted Friends of the Second Amendment.  Firearm and ammunition sales have spiked in the last month.  Soundbites and article quotes give the impression some of the purchasers are eagerly anticipating a breakdown of order.

Fear can be a useful response.  It’s what allowed our prehistoric ancestors to survive, and it can do the same for us.  The important thing is to temper fear with judgment and reason.  Unless you’re directly faced with an existential threat and must act immediately and decisively, there is time for risk analysis. 

Certain habits born of experience help, too.  I’ve been able to stay home for seventeen days and counting because I came home to a full cupboard, fridge, and freezer.  As a kid that was not always the case, so my routine as an adult is to augment my weekly food shopping with staples or household items that haven’t run out but will in coming weeks.  I wasn’t planning on being confined at home and I did not buy in hoarder quantities.  But I had enough to last long enough to minimize outside contact during the first part of the crisis.

Naturally, there were and are a few underlying assumptions.  One was that I would have essentials like running water, electricity, and gas.  (Check, at least so far.)  Another is that retail businesses will stay open and properly stocked.  (We’ll see.)  And so, while I’m naturally cautious I probably would be in a bad place if a full-scale catastrophe struck.

So would you, most likely, though the preppers would be happier than pigs in shit should the unthinkable occur.  There is an unspoken faith in the systems that sustain us.  The COVID-19 pandemic is causing people to question for the first time whether they are robust enough to get us through and not just those on the fringes.  I am very reluctant to entertain the possibility of a disease-driven societal collapse reminiscent of The Stand.  However, even a partial, temporary collapse such as that after Hurricane Katrina multiplied across several regions would shake public confidence to the point where we might see our society permanently transformed and not in the way armchair idealists like me would prefer.

Some of what’s happening was foreseeable and thus preventable, and some of it not.  The New York Times reported this week that the federal government had contracted with a medical device startup back in the late aughts to manufacture a reserve supply of respirators to meet a potential emergency; following a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers and attempted contract renegotiations this never came to pass. That was an attempt at foresight, sabotaged by corporate capitalism though it ultimately was.  The novel coronavirus, as the name implies, was not specifically foreseen and could not have been because we cannot predict evolution.  But if plans had gone as planned, we would have had a better response to COVID-19 than we’ve had.

Past experience with numerous outbreaks affords a roadmap—H1N1 in 2009, SARS and MERS before that, the 1967 Hong Kong flu, not to mention the big daddy of ‘em all, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19—but hindsight is myopic.  Or if we do remember the epidemic spectre, it tends to be PR embarrassments such as the 1976 swine flu fiasco.  Then there’s the fact that both culturally and a matter of business practice we plan for the short to mid-term but seldom for the long haul.

I don’t know what to make of it all. I’m just holed up in my modest abode waiting for the next development.  There’s some distancing you can’t pull off. 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Remote

It’s been a week.  I’ve been cooped up indoors for a solid week.

Like so many others, I’m self-isolating in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Along with a comparative few lucky enough able to do so, I am working remotely.  I’ve left the house only to check the mail and take out the trash.  So far, I don’t mind.  My habits are solitary, so the social distancing thing is pretty much a given.  Better to stay home than to deal with a paranoid public outside my front door.

I’d said so long to last Thursday’s evening class telling them that we’d interact online for the next two or three weeks, the timespan quoted by the administration.  As of midweek the duration has been extended until semester’s end (right before Memorial Day).  I’ve seen the last of my students; from now on our relationship will be virtual.

I’m ambivalent toward online instruction.  My summer classes are usually distance learning, leaving me free to check in from wherever which means I can travel on my own schedule and not necessarily on semester breaks alone.  (Not that I’ll be traveling anywhere anytime soon…) 

But in person classes work best in my experience.  Liberal arts subjects are narratives, and it’s hard even with recorded lectures to sustain a narrative with any life in it online.  All you’re doing, really, is presenting bare facts, and students are paradoxically more likely to ask questions in a physical classroom than by email or LMS message.  Online discussion boards are stilted and inhibit meaningful dialogue.

The abrupt shift to online only has caused the predictable heartburn among colleagues and students alike.  As one student put it last week, “If I wanted to take an online class I would’ve signed up for an online class.”

It’s for our own good, of course.  And we’re all in it together, albeit in cyberspace.  But it’s not the inconvenience that worries me about my students’ welfare.  There’s the obvious; I want them all well.  But the local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, and my younger learners (and not a few of their elders) typically work in hospitality. While they undoubtedly have lots of time now to devote to my class, they’re not earning what they need to pay the bills.

There’s a lot of that going on.  Daily unemployment claims in my state doubled over the last two days.  Meanwhile surreal headlines commingle the horrible and mundane; one from yesterday’s CNN newsfeed read “U.S. Death Toll Hits 149; Dozens of Malls Close.”  Conflicting messages about the crisis continue to shake confidence.  And when there is uncertainty in a crisis people start to behave unpredictably.

The examples of erratic behavior are mounting so fast you need wings to stay above them.  A middle-aged Brooklynite got in a shouting match with a bunch of twentysomethings congregating outside a bar.  He felt the patrons should have stayed home.  One woman was quoted in a news report as being too scared to buy gas because she might pick up coronavirus from the pump handle, evidently forgetting she could have just gotten a couple of paper towels from the dispenser to avoid skin contact.  People without symptoms insist upon wearing face masks in public despite pleas from health officials to refrain from doing so.

Then there’s the panic buying and hoarding.  Fortunately there hasn’t been any of that locally; on my last trip to the supermarket everyone was shopping normally.  But you hear the stories.  There’s the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of course.  There are the nervous suburbanites clearing shelves of pasta, rice, and beans as if in anticipation of a siege.  Then there are the enterprising folks who roam from store to store buying up scarce items looking to sell them at a premium on Amazon.  Just today a senior citizen was robbed in a parking lot of the bag of groceries she was carrying.  I had to read that last story twice to believe it.

It’s easy to get a laugh out of panic buying when there’s no credible evidence of impending shortages.  But there are vulnerable people already adversely affected by the abrupt economic downturn who could be made to suffer further, people who don’t have the financial resources to meet price increases in household necessities.  At this point there are local food banks forced to cut back on their operations due to the quarantine policies, and the one serving students at my college has closed for the time being.

Economic divides become more evident in crises.  The online editions of the Business Journal ran an article today—behind a paywall, naturally—with the headline, “The Rich Confront the Virus: ‘Do I Quarantine in the Hamptons?’”  The opening line, the only one publicly visible, reads with nary a touch of irony, “Even in an age of inequality, a global pandemic can be a great—and terrible—leveler.”

Normally I’d dismiss such a fatuous pronouncement with a harsh laugh if it didn’t echo a tidbit a student shared with me.  The student works as a livery driver shuttling well-to-do seasonal residents from our small airport to whichever mountain aerie is their home away from home.  That afternoon she had driven a family arriving from the Bay Area.  People with means tend to be unguarded among the servant class, and these were no exception.  It was a younger family with school-aged kids, and one parent remarked to the other that it was a good thing the schools had closed since they could “wait out” the “craziness” seizing San Francisco and other cities.

This student is both observant and perceptive, and she was startled and amazed by their choice of words.  She was disturbed by their obliviousness.  They believed themselves above it all and had decided to take an extended ski vacation while civilization broke down elsewhere.

I’m not so surprised.  We’ve been on a slippery slope toward apocalyptic thinking for a long time.  Whether this is due to the disproportionate cultural influence of evangelical Christianity or plain and simple self-absorbed fear is hard to say.  It’s probably a little of both.  Community is a thing of the past.  As Robert Putnam put it, we’re bowling alone.  COVID is making us even more suspicious of each other than usual.

Returning to the vacationing family, they would surely be indignant at what their driver did once she had safely delivered them at their destination.  She thoroughly cleaned the car’s interior with disinfectant.  It probably never occurred to them that they could possibly pose a threat to anyone; it’s the rest of the world that’s the threat.  Remote, indeed.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar 

A Paradise on Earth: Part 8 - Those Who Do Not Remember the Past...

Tragedies in America are ephemeral.  The information barrage brought by the 24/7 news cycle and social media gives little time to process before the next round of horrors manifests itself.

The demise of Peoples Temple happened in a simpler time, which is to say that the news media reported stories piecemeal as they collected and analyzed facts rather than breaking them in real time accompanied by anxiety-inducing speculation.  And so it was that the Jonestown story evolved over weeks, even in San Francisco as the city simultaneously coped with the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

We like things simple.  In the popular mind, Peoples Temple was a cult whose fanatical leader led its members to their death.  Initial media depictions reinforced this.  A couple of years after Jonestown, the TV movie Guyana Tragedy offered a lurid depiction of Jim Jones and his Svengali-like hold on his followers.  The best thing about the film was Powers Boothe’s fine performance as Jones, but its historical veracity is flimsy.  Most of the published histories of Peoples Temple—Raven by Tim Reiterman, Our Father Who Art in Hell by James Reston, and A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres, to name but a few—tend to emphasize the cult-like nature of the Temple’s final years.

Shiva Naipaul offered an analysis drawing upon and reinforcing cultural perceptions of 1970s California in his work Journey to Nowhere (published as Black & White outside the U.S.)  Trinidadian-born Briton Naipaul (brother to V. S. Naipaul) begins his book with the last leg of his journey from London to Georgetown via Port of Spain immediately after the Jonestown disaster.  According to Naipaul, Guyana’s socialist leadership had created such severe shortages of everyday consumer goods that the passengers stole soap and toilet paper from the airplane’s lavatories before landing.  He strongly implies that Guyana would have been better off under continued British rule rather than suffer the inept governance of Forbes Burnham.  (Naipaul seems to have suffered what Frantz Fanon termed the colonized mind; a West Indian of East Indian extraction he was nonetheless an apologist for British cultural hegemony.)

Ensconced with other reporters at the Pegasus Hotel, Naipaul’s captious eye looked askance at the banalities of Christmas decorations, festive music, and his colleagues’ idle gossip around the swimming pool.  The daily press briefings yielded little information, and Naipaul decided to investigate the cultural milieu that produced Peoples Temple.  He was off to California.

Naipaul engaged in field research of a sort which brought him in contact with West Coast devotees of New Age beliefs, alternative religions, and other adherents of what remained of the 1960s counterculture.  He also delved into the question of what made a place like Guyana attractive to someone like Jim Jones.

Guyanese prime minister Forbes Burnham, who led the country from independence until his death in 1985, was perhaps typical of the first generation of postcolonial leaders.  His socialist ideology dovetailed well with the revolutionary orientation of Peoples Temple.  Carrying it out was challenging.  British Guiana had been an undeveloped backwater of the Empire.  Even today, Guyana lacks a skilled workforce and adequate physical infrastructure.  Agriculture, logging, and mining remain the leading industries.

Guyana’s racial politics might also have appealed to Jones.  The indigenous Amerindians mainly inhabited rural areas and were underrepresented in the political process.  However, there were deep divides between those of Afro-Caribbean ancestry who were particularly impoverished and the more prosperous South and East Asian merchant class.  Burnham’s party outmaneuvered that of his rival Cheddi Jagan before independence.  He achieved this partly with covert American help; the CIA ironically wanted to avoid a Guyana led by Jagan because Jagan had been a self-avowed Marxist earlier in his career.

Once in charge, Burnham’s politics veered leftward.  Burnham had an affinity with outsiders on the fringes of their own societies.  Peoples Temple wasn’t the only religious sect that settled in Guyana.  Another group of American emigrés was the House of Israel, led by one Rabbi David Hill (whose birth certificate was issued in the name of Edward Washington).  Still another group was the black nationalist organization The East, which sought expatriation from the U.S. and, like Jones, saw Guyana as the ideal place.  Self-proclaimed Trinidadian revolutionary Michael X, who had been a minor celebrity in Swinging London, sought refuge in Guyana after it was found out he had killed a rival and his girlfriend and buried their bodies his back yard. 

Forbes Burnham’s revolutionary solidarity did not extend to harboring common murderers.  Attempting to flee arrest in Georgetown, Michael X impulsively hiked into the dense forest, got lost, and wound up being apprehended at a remote police post.  He was extradited to Trinidad, tried, found guilty, and hanged in 1975.  (V. S. Naipaul would ponder the significance of the Michael X case in the essay “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” having already based a character on him in his 1975 novel Guerillas, portraying him as a figment of his own rhetoric and the prevailing zeitgeist.)

Returning to Shiva Naipaul’s attempt to link Peoples Temple with the West Coast counterculture, I believe such ties are tenuous.  The largest segment of its membership was African American and older.  For most of the Temple’s history, they made up most of the congregation.  The move to California did coincide with the rise of the counterculture.  There, it began to attract younger, idealistic whites who were brought in by Jones’ commitment to civil rights.  Toward the end, in San Francisco, the congregation took in individuals who were alienated by the failed promises of the 1960s.

The kind of revolutionary agitation Jim Jones favored had fallen out of favor by the late 1970s.  Peoples Temple bucked the trends of the Me Decade and the mainstream culture’s inward turn toward hedonism.  Its adherents were a self-sacrificing sort who needed a spiritual succor the prevailing cultural trends could not offer.  The downside was this self-sacrifice was taken to its chillingly inevitable conclusion.  This conclusion was justified, sadly, by Jones’ misinterpretation of Huey Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.”  Newton did not advocate actual suicide; he meant that it may be necessary on occasion for revolutionaries to give their lives in the fight against oppression.  Jones probably knew of this distinction, but at the end it made no difference for the residents of Jonestown.

But Peoples Temple’s spiritual core was not anchored in the delusions and hypocrisies of Jim Jones, but in the hearts of its members.  Annie Moore, one of Jonestown’s nurses and a member of the inner circle, left a last note before dying.  One must be careful when weighing the words and deeds of Jones’ intimates; Annie Moore may have been idealistic, but she was arguably a mass murderer for her role in concocting the poison.  Nevertheless, her parting note was particularly heartfelt, even plaintive.  She praised the Temple for its inclusiveness and for accepting those society rejected, and echoed Jones’ belief that they could no longer go on in this world: “We died because you would not let us live in peace.”

Jonestown did not exactly live up to the rainbows and unicorns picture Annie portrayed in the note, but was it the hell on earth its critics claimed?  I tend to think not.  Again, we need to look away from Jim Jones and at the society which formed around him.  Peoples Temple brought out the best in many of its adherents.  As an intentional community, in the Midwest, in California, and in the rainforest, it functioned better and longer than any number of contemporaneous attempts at utopia.  The Temple afforded spiritual comfort, its leader’s probable atheism aside, a belief in building a better world, and material security.  In the end, it was mutual devotion to their ideals and to each other that bound them together.

On one level, Peoples Temple reflects certain truths about us.  We Americans are a seeking people, to the point of excessive credulity.  There is something which draws us to the irrational.  Recent media reports point to Millennials’ rising interest in the occult, for instance.  A widespread distrust of science and a populist woo which produces phenomena like the anti-vaxxer movement are indicative of a collective suspension of disbelief toward even the most dubious claims.  Knowing this, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether a broadly-based religious movement centered around a charismatic leader such as Jim Jones could emerge today.

Probably not.  Peoples Temple was a product of its time and places (plural intended).  It’s hard to imagine a similar experiment emerging today when the idea of social justice is frequently ridiculed and the most visible religious tendency in America is a politicized evangelical Christianity fixated on exclusion and punishment.  Heightened racial distrust would also inhibit the appeal and growth of such a church.  Our excessive individualism and self-absorption would also work against it.  Its tragic end notwithstanding, the lives and deeds of Peoples Temple present a favorable contrast to the barren social landscape we presently inhabit.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 7 - The Reckoning

The sight which greeted the first people to enter Jonestown on the morning of November 19, 1978, beggared description.  The TV news images that went out later that day were horrifying and were unlike anything else the American public had ever seen up until that point.  The emotional impact for those seeing it first and in person must have been beyond overwhelming.

Encountering the Jonestown horrors was the culmination of two days’ turmoil in Guyana, in the jungle and in Georgetown.   Congressman Leo Ryan lay dead at the Port Kaituma airstrip, cut down by Peoples Temple gunmen.  Several others, including NBC News cameraman Bob Brown, were also dead.  The survivors, including Ryan aide Jackie Speier, were badly wounded. 

After Jim Jones had declared that it was time to commit “revolutionary suicide,” a handful of Jonestown residents managed to evade security and go into the surrounding forest while a small party excused themselves earlier in the day to go on a picnic.  Others, including Tim Carter and Mike Prokes, were sent away on Temple business.  Lawyers Charles Garry and Mark Lane, bitter rivals, managed to set aside their differences as they too waited out Jonestown’s demise huddled in the undergrowth on its fringes.  Hyacinth Thrash, some stories go, slept through the whole thing.

In Georgetown, Stephan Jones, convinced his father had had a mental breakdown, ignored his mother’s pleas to return to Jonestown opting to stay on with the Temple basketball team.  Sharon Amos, a devoted follower to the end, took her own life and those of her children at the Temple’s capital residence.

The first priority was evacuating the injured survivors.  For Guyanese and U.S. authorities, this was the easy part.  By contrast. processing the remains of the deceased was a near-insurmountable task.  Decency dictates that individual human remains be treated respectfully.  When people die one at a time, this is practicable.  In a mass casualty scenario with almost a thousand dead in a remote location in a tropical climate, this is impossible.

Even as the authorities arrived in Jonestown scant hours after the deaths the stink of decomposition permeated the atmosphere.  The aggregate weight of the bodies was probably between 70 and 75 tons.  Guyanese law mandated autopsies in the event of unnatural death; this was logistically overwhelming even in a developed country.  The Guyanese chief pathologist, Leslie Mootoo, got this requirement waived so that the remains could be expeditiously repatriated.  However, causes of death had to be determined.  U.S. officials ultimately chose seven individuals for examination.

The body of Jim Jones was of course one of the seven.  The autopsy of so few victims naturally upset loved ones back home who wanted answers.  Rebecca Moore, professor of religious studies at San Diego State University and expert on Peoples Temple, has written of their emotional trauma.  Dr. Moore’s interest is personal; her sisters Carolyn Moore Layton and Annie Moore died at Jonestown, as did her nephew Kimo Prokes.  The sisters’ remains were among the seven. 

The medical examiners’ conclusions were ambiguous.  The bodies, already in poor condition when found, had been embalmed in Georgetown before being sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  This hindered complete findings of cause.  A few things were known.  All but Jones had taken cyanide.  Jones had died of a gunshot to the head, as had Annie Moore even though she also had a lethal concentration of cyanide in her system.  Who administered the gunshots to whom was unclear.  Extrapolating the autopsies along with the evidence at the scene led to a conclusion of mass poisoning.

Back in San Francisco, the early reports from South America were ominous and confusing.  The city’s remaining Temple contingent got word by shortwave radio of Leo Ryan’s murder and the tumble of events afterwards.  Associate pastor Hue Fortson, whom Jones had sent back to California shorty before Ryan’s visit, has remarked upon the devastating impact of the first reports in interviews.  As information filtered to the local and national news media, even the wildest rumors surrounding Jonestown paled in comparison to the revelations coming out of Guyana in the ensuing days and weeks.

The resulting story was one-sided.  It is difficult to defend a mass murder / suicide, but there were few voices from active Temple members in California in the media discourse in the closing weeks of 1978.  By contrast, the Concerned Relatives were taking a victory lap.   The deaths of a congressman and a few bystanders and those of 909 settlers were bad, but we told you so.  It was inevitable.  They drank the Kool Aid.

Attorneys Garry and Lane made their media appearances where they praised the efforts of attorneys Garry and Lane on behalf of Peoples Temple, and wasn’t it a tragedy so many died?  Few of the Temple leadership survived the tragedy and so there really wasn’t any effective rebuttal to the narrative that the people in Jonestown were mere sheep.

The Jonestown disaster was punctuated a few months later in a budget motel room in Modesto, California.  Mike Prokes had been a local television reporter in the sleepy San Joaquin Valley town before meeting a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones.  The public relations man and Planning Commission member was sent out of Jonestown with the settlement’s monetary assets on November 18^th, with instructions to hand them over to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown.  As recriminations hung in the air in the early months of 1979, Prokes called a press conference.

The invitation had eight takers.  Mike Prokes read them a prepared statement urging further examination of the so-called “death tape” in addition to the hundreds of other recordings of Jim Jones as a partial explanation for what happened.  He accused the State Department of setting the events leading to the mass suicide into motion by not objecting to Leo Ryan’s visit because Jones sought to move his people to the Soviet Union.  He emphasized the ideals of Peoples Temple and asked that the dead be remembered favorably for them.

After reading the statement, Prokes excused himself to the bathroom.  He then shot himself in the head.  He was found with a note emphasizing that he took his life not out of despair but in an effort to refocus the discussion away from the thought terminating cliché of Peoples Temple as a death cult.  Charles Garry got a note of his own from Prokes, as did Herb Caen at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mike Prokes’ end in a shabby little room was anticlimactic, a tree falling in the forest with no aural witnesses.  The narrative was established early and for the long term.  The world had made up its mind about Peoples Temple.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 6 - Exeunt

“I believe that the balance of the evidence about using cyanide indicates it is best not used.”

Derek Humphry, Final Exit

Cyanide is a chemical asphyxiant.  It interferes with the bloodstream’s ability to carry oxygen from the lungs.  It acts very quickly, with the symptoms of a lethal cyanide poisoning occurring within several minutes if ingested and death taking place minutes to maybe a couple of hours after that.  Inhaling cyanide gas yields quicker results.

One debated question is whether the poisoned individual suffers.  One source has it that there really isn’t any suffering, that buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood brings on rapid unconsciousness and the end comes peacefully.

That’s one perspective.  Anecdotal accounts say differently.  Several states used hydrogen cyanide gas to carry out executions before the advent of lethal injection.  Nevada was the first to adopt lethal gas in the 1920s.  It was touted as more humane than hanging.  The condemned would simply drift off to a permanent sleep.

The reality was another matter.  Nevada’s first gas chamber execution involved a Chinese immigrant named Gee Jon, who was convicted of killing a member of a rival tong.  Gee Jon did not take it well, understandably.  While the witnesses did not report any undue suffering on the prisoner’s part, there were a few hiccups in the execution protocol. 

About four pounds of liquid cyanide were pumped in, but it was a chilly day and much of the poison pooled on the chamber floor.  A few witnesses said at one point they smelled bitter almonds, a telltale sign of a leak, which caused the viewing room to be evacuated until it could be ascertained there was in fact no leak.  The coroner refused to autopsy Gee Jong for fear he would be poisoned upon opening up the corpse.  Nevertheless, the Gee Jong execution was deemed a success and other states soon followed the Silver State’s lead.

The lore of the gas chamber contains a number of hair-raising stories.  The condemned would go into convulsions.  Blood would trickle from the nostrils.  The mouth would foam.  Very unpleasant to watch.

Executions in California’s death chamber were their own source of legend.  Barbara Graham, convicted with two accomplices of murdering an elderly woman, was advised by the corrections officer strapping her into the chair to wait until the cyanide eggs dropped into the hydrochloric acid, then take a deep breath.  Unconsciousness would come quickly, she was assured.  Graham’s response: “How the hell would you know?” 

Caryl Chessman, condemned for kidnapping under California’s Little Lindbergh law, had fought his death sentence in the courts for over a decade, becoming an international cause célèbre in the process.  Chessman could only delay the inevitable, however, and he was determined to extend his life by an additional minute if that’s what it came down to.  Once the gas was released, he held his breath as long as possible before succumbing to the need to exhale and inhale.  Chessman’s end was predictably agonizing.

Ingesting cyanide is a somewhat slower death, but it is 100% effective.  At the end of the Second World War, a number of top Nazis committed suicide this way.  Hermann Goering cheated the hangman at Nuremburg just hours before his scheduled execution, using a cyanide capsule he had smuggled into his prison cell.

Cyanide would be the chosen means of death by Jim Jones and camp physician Larry Schacht for the residents of Jonestown.  Although Schacht had not researched lethal poisons until sometime in early 1978, Jones had long used the specter of suicide by poison as a loyalty test of his inner circle.  The so-called “White Nights” in Jonestown were rehearsals for the inevitable.  The means simply had to be worked out.

The murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and several members of his party spelled the end of Peoples Temple and its leader.  When Jonestown’s residents gathered at the pavilion one last time, they learned of the congressman’s fate and their own as well.  The “medicine” was ready for them.

The lethal cocktail was potassium cyanide, diphenhydramine hydrochloride, and, according to a few sources, Thorazine.  The drugs were mixed in with vats of grape Flavor-Aid.  As a layman researching the story, I find the choice of ingredients puzzling.  Cyanide works fast, so why the need of the other two medications?  I’ve never taken Thorazine, but it stands to reason that it would take an hour or two to reach full effect.  I have taken diphenhydramine lots of times—it’s the active ingredient of over-the-counter medications such as Benadryl and Unisom.  As a sleep aid, it takes a couple of hours to work.  But Dr. Schacht had his reasons, I suppose.

Why did the people of Jonestown acquiesce?  There were guards around the pavilion, to be sure, armed with rifles and crossbows.  Still, if a number of people made a break for it most would have had a chance.  Groupthink is one explanation.  But there were arguments voiced against suicide.  Christine Miller, who had joined Peoples Temple in Los Angeles and had a reputation for outspokenness, openly challenged Jim Jones’ decision in front of everyone. 

Christine Miller was both typical and an outlier among Temple adherents.  The daughter of Texas sharecroppers, she made her way to Southern California and worked as a civil servant.  When she joined Peoples Temple, Christine had made a comfortable life for herself.  She wanted to do more and the Temple afforded ample opportunities to help others.  Like many Temple members, she had donated most of her assets to the church.  Although she went along with most of Jones’ dictates Christine Miller was one of the relatively few individuals allowed to dispute Jim Jones, albeit within reason. 

Christine emigrated to Guyana on her own, unlike most of Jonestown’s settlers.  She soon regretted this decision, believing Jonestown was a failing experiment and telling Jones she would be more useful back home.  Despite it all, she remained.

At the pavilion, Jones asked if there were any dissenting opinions to the “revolutionary suicide” he proposed.  Christine Miller stepped up to the mike.  The ensuing exchange, caught on the so-called “death tape,” is remarkable.  Christine questioned the morality of killing children.  She pointed out that where there is life, there is hope (a theme from Jones’ sermons.)  She asked whether immigrating to Russia was still an option.

Jones replied it was too late for Russia and that suicide was the only means of allaying the pain of life.  The exchange was fairly civil at first, with Jones saying he respected Christine and her opinions.  Background voices seem to show that a few people in the crowd were sympathetic to her at first.  But as the dialogue went on, others loudly objected to Christine’s words with some comparing her to the defectors who had just left with Leo Ryan. 

Finally, Jim McElvane intervened.  McElvane was a recent arrival at Jonestown also from the Los Angeles congregation, but he was a member of the Temple’s security team and a trusted confidante to Jones.  McElvane peremptorily cut Christine Miller off, telling her she owed her life to Jim Jones and to stop her needless arguing.

The matter was settled.  People queued behind the poison vats, drinking their death from paper cups.  Small children had the brew injected with oral syringes.  Those who resisted were quickly subdued and given the poison by hypodermic.  The process was supervised by Marceline Jones and the camp nurses, Annie Moore among them. 

Not everyone was subjected to the poison.  Lawyers Charles Garry and Mark Felt were told to leave and retreated into the tree line until it was safe to venture out.  Financial secretary Maria Katsaris gave suitcases of cash to brothers Tim and Mike Carter and Mike Prokes for delivery to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown, along with letters transferring rights to the Temple’s offshore bank accounts.  Katsaris also furnished them with revolvers.  She instructed them that they were not to be taken alive.  The suitcases were very heavy and the men did not get far.  They abandoned the suitcases, took part of the cash from them, and walked along the railroad tracks to Port Kaituma where they were taken into custody by the police.

A few got away by subterfuge.  Stanley Clayton, a young survivor of Oakland’s streets, bluffed his way past security on the pretext of an official errand.  Clayton had witnessed the death throes of the first people who drank the poison and wanted no part of it.  He, too, hid at the edge of the surrounding jungle.  Odell Rhodes got away in a similar fashion.  Grover Davis missed the call to the pavilion and hid in a ditch once the suicides began.  Several others, nine adults and children, had left earlier in the day, before Ryan’s assassination, to go on a “picnic” as part of a prearranged escape plan. 

Hyacinth Thrash survived by default.  Depending on the source, she either slept through the suicides and awoke the next morning to find a field of dead bodies lying face down around the pavilion or she heard the commotion and hid until it was over.  Either way, she survived.  Mrs. Thrash would live on for nearly twenty more years.

Jonestown was not the only venue for Temple suicides.  Sharon Amos headed the Peoples Temple contingent in Georgetown.  Informed of Leo Ryan’s death and Rev. Jim’s decision by radio, she was instructed to kill the Temple’s “enemies” in the capital and to then take their own lives.  She settled for cutting the throats of her two youngest children.  Afterward, Sharon and her eldest daughter Liane Harris simultaneously slashed each other’s throats.

Staying at the Georgetown house were Stephan Jones and the Jonestown basketball team, who were in town to play an exhibition game.  Marceline Jones urged her son to return to Jonestown as Leo Ryan’s visit approached but Stephan refused.  Stephan recognized that his father was becoming increasingly unhinged and had resolved to stay away.  Frustrated, he left with his teammates in their van the afternoon of Ryan’s assassination and missed the carnage.

Back at the Jonestown pavilion, it became quiet as darkness approached.  Jim Jones’ taped death rant ended.  He would be either the last or second to last to die.  He did not drink the cyanide but died from a gunshot to the head.  Lying nearby was nurse Annie Moore.  According to the autopsy of her badly decomposed body, there was a lethal amount of cyanide in her tissues but she had also suffered a gunshot to the head.  One explanation is that Jones shot himself; another is that Moore shot him then herself. 

But why the poison and the gun?  Either would have been sufficient on its own.  One explanation is that she wanted to be certain of dying.  After all, should she fail there would be a lot of explaining to do having fatally poisoned nearly a thousand people.  Maybe she trusted the cyanide to do the job but chose to hasten things as the symptoms set in.  It’s academic in any case.

As morning fell upon Jonestown on November 19, 1978, police and Guyana Defence Force soldiers entered the settlement.  It was all over.  The world outside was left to wonder and speculate.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar