Usually you need the Oxford English Dictionary to discover when an expression came into use in English. But the genesis of “drink the Kool-Aid” is easy to pinpoint: it seared a horrified world’s consciousness exactly 30 years ago today. Charles A. Krause writes in WaPo:
Jackie Speier now represents California’s 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The last time I saw her, 30 years ago, her bloody, bullet-riddled body lay in tall grass at the side of a jungle airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana.
She had been gunned down by four assassins sent by the Rev. Jim Jones to kill congressman Leo J. Ryan — and the rest of us who had accompanied him to investigate reports of violence, torture and sexual abuse in a place called Jonestown. …
Within a day, NBC would have a short film-clip that those who saw it can never forget. The sequence begins with Leo Ryan and a few others milling about near the plane waiting to fly them out of the jungle. From the right appears an open-bed truck with figures in it — gunmen who spring out and open fire. As the walkers fall, the camera jerks to ground-level, on its side at a crazy angle, having recorded the only murder of a United States Congressman in the line of duty in history. The NBC videographer, Bob Brown, as well as photographer Greg Robinson, NBC reporter Don Harris, and Jonestown defector Patricia Parks die with Ryan.
Like Ryan legal advisor Speier, reporter Krause would lie bleeding and terrified for 15 hours before help arrived. But what their rescuers found at the airstrip was nothing compared to what awaited them five miles away — over 900 adults’ and children’s corpses swelling in the equatorial sun, a U.S. civilian death toll for a non-natural event not to be surpassed until 9/11. As WaPo’s Krause was the first to report, amid the piled dead sat a vat of purple liquid that turned out to be Valium-laced and cyanide-poisoned Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid after all). Jim Jones himself sprawled in a deck chair shaded by a pavilion, dead of a gunshot to the head that the Guyanese coroner pronounced self-inflicted.
Read Krause. Read Wikipedia if you like. Watch this YouTube.
Just be mindful how you toss around “drink the Kool-Aid.” It’s really not cute.
