MAGA As Cult

Nine hundred eighteen people drank a cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and died in the Guyana jungle compound of Jim Jones forty-four years ago. Why? Because their pathological narcissist leader told them to.

Fast forward to now. Today we have about twenty percent of our adult population swallowing the same concoction of paranoid fabrications from the man with the red tie. Perhaps they yearn to be part of a story; but the narrative is false. The hollow man holds empty promises. He has tapped into the latent racism and loathing of aggrieved Americans which is a corallary of fear.

My dear friends Claire and Richard had joined the People’s Temple along with their two pre-teen children. They survived; their kids did not. The attraction grew out of a disaffection for all that ails America and the simplicity of authoritarianism. The enemy is out there and out to get us, preached Jim Jones, the charismatic cult megalomaniac.   

I had visited them in San Francisco during those years and was struck by the absence of any dissent. Word came from the top and was not to be doubted. Disputation was punished. Tyrants make no allowance for doubt.

If I may be allowed to plagiarize myself, I wrote a poem at the time with the line, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Doubt encourages the freedom to question which was clearly denied to them. When they did dare recognize their loss of autonomy it was too late.

I want to spare myself the taste of vitriol which the MAGA folks engender. How a sociopath has risen to sit in the Oval Office is the stuff of a trashy movie script which should have been shredded years back. But the more tragic story is the mindless millions who have abdicated their common sense and the precepts of this country.

In the jungle of the conspiracies and mendacities fed them, they threaten to overthrow our democracy in favor of a dictatorship, indistinguishable from 1930s Germany. Those for whom avarice is a virtue, may think the man with orange hair serves their purpose. In fact they serve his.