"I Could Find Nothing Wrong With This Man"
Learning lessons about not learning lessons
It’s normal for people to deny the obvious. It’s sick, and it’s normal.
A black reporter at New York magazine breaks the story that BLM leaders bought themselves a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles, and Patrisse Cullors responds with a statement saying that white supremacists are making her feel unsafe.
A long wave of emerging data calls into question the claims that government agencies and pharmaceutical companies have made about the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, and the fact-based discussion is derided as conspiracy theories spread by anti-vaxxers who don’t believe in science.
And on and on. Why are you asking questions about shortages of formula for infants — DID PUTIN TELL YOU TO SAY THAT!?!?!?
This is why I’m still suggesting that you read Tim Reiterman’s book Raven, a detailed history of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. It’s not possible to exaggerate this point: Attacking the messenger is normal behavior, and people choose not to see obvious truth a whole lot later than you would ever think.
Jim Jones was shrewd, he had a different face for different rooms and audiences, and he wrote a lot of checks. He turned out crowds of Temple members for the cameras at political rallies, so he had friends in Democratic Party politics in San Francisco, and got a personal audience with Rosalynn Carter. He showed up to events with the lieutenant governor of California, and he got Mayor George Moscone to appoint him to the board of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Famous radical activists — Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Dennis Banks — offered their public support for the Peoples Temple, depicting it as a brilliant project built on a firm support for socialist principle and a commitment to racial justice. And Willie Brown, ladies and gentlemen, who was probably the Temple’s best public friend, praised Jones loudly and clearly, and opened doors for him in state and local politics. At a testimonial dinner in September of 1976, every important politician in the city showed up to honor the leader of Peoples Temple, with Brown serving as master of ceremonies; closing out the evening, Brown compared Jones to great and decent leaders like, I am once again not making this up, Chairman Mao.
And so, when journalists in the Bay Area started getting tips about beatings, child abuse, financial scandal, and sexual exploitation at Peoples Temple, the attacks made on the journalists who wrote what they heard were entirely predictable: it’s racism, it’s right-wing hostility, these are atavistic attacks on an advocate of social justice. Willie Brown said that a brave man like Jim Jones “absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Because of his decency and his commitment to social justice, right?
Alongside those public attacks, reporters who wrote the first few critical investigative stories about Peoples Temple in 1977 quickly discovered that their unlisted home phone numbers had been widely distributed among Temple members.
Now, spend twelve minutes watching one of the most extraordinary conversations you’ll ever see. This panel discussion took place on live television on November 20, 1978 — two days after the massacre at Jonestown that killed 918 people, before the bodies had even been recovered. The video is cued to start a minute or so before the panel discussion, so you can watch Willie Brown’s CYA performance, but really watch the panel discussion that follows:
One of the panelists is Carlton Goodlett, a personal friend of Jim Jones, who published the Sun Reporter, an African-American newspaper in San Francisco. Listen closely to every word he says: You can’t evaluate the bad in Jim Jones without seeing the good; Leo Ryan is really responsible for his own death, because he flew down there when people told him not to; and the Sun Reporter had looked at the same allegations of abuse that other local newspapers had covered, but couldn’t find anything that suggested they were true. "I could find nothing wrong with this man,” Goodlett says. On November 20, 1978, with bodies still rotting on the ground in Jonestown.
The people who can find nothing wrong with these vaccines are normal. Sycophants, goer-alongers, slogan-chanters, status-signalers, people arguing along the lines of their own affiliations and interests, people who simply have no ability to evaluate information. They’ve always been with us.
Jim Jones rehearsed mass suicide under coercive conditions, and Temple defectors offered explicit warnings that he had set a deliberate course toward it. People saw what Jonestown was, they said what it was, and they were attacked and dismissed. There are always people who find it more comfortable to take the side of evil and depravity. You don’t have to care what they think. All of the absolutely pathetic current maneuvers — critics of BLM’s real estate purchases are white supremacists, criticism of Pfizer means you hate science, and everyone to the right of Elizabeth Warren is a puppet of Vladimir Putin — are just the normal sad-sack sleight of hand, the completely ordinary noise pollution of the public sphere. Carlton Goodlett has ideological grandchildren, and they’re boring.
We’re currently in the phase where people see the truth, but still aren’t prepared to. And so this news story:
…says, of course, that high case rates in highly vaccinated places means that the vaccines work, and so be sure to get your booster. All buildings equipped with new fire-prevention device burn down; fire-prevention experts say this proves it works.
Two days after the Jonestown Massacre, the prominent Peoples Temple advocate Carlton Goodlett thought people should remember the good side of Jim Jones, too, and he was still pretty sure that there had been no warning signs that anyone could have seen. It’s normal behavior, it’s tedious behavior, and there are no mysteries about it.
For the record, if a large number of our political and cultural elite wants to commit mass suicide, I would be OK with that. Delighted, in fact. Then we could "build back better" in a meaningful way.
This Jim Jones analogy keeps reverberating around in my head since your first article. It’s dead on spot accurate.