Drinking the Kool-Aid: A (Partial) 2009 Directory

The expression “drinking the Kool-Aid” is now deeply embedded into American slang – often as throwaway and/or commonly-understood lines in sports, business, and popular culture – with upwards of a dozen references appearing on news feeds every day. Especially in political arena, the saying has become increasingly weaponized, as partisans on all sides use it to disparage the intellectual capacity and discernment of their opponents.

Nevertheless, there have been several serious considerations of the phrase in several commentaries during the past year, including:

Becoming A Cult Brand
by Richard Linnett, Media Post Magazine, 1 July 2009

How To Obtain a Really Devoted Following

It’s a foolproof marketing technique – turning customers into slavish, unthinking, devoted followers of products. In other words, zombies. It’s a strategy that can create legions of pod people dedicated to a particular brand, leaving all rivals in the dust. The best customer a brand could have is an actual cult follower.

Jim Jones and Kool-Aid

Be careful that a larger brand doesn’t steal your thunder: The Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, in which more than 800 members of the Jones cult committed mass suicide, has forever been wrongly linked to Kool-Aid. The popular phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” referring to people who blindly follow authority, is one of the lasting legacies of the Jonestown massacre. And yet the powdered drink that Jones laced with cyanide to kill his followers was not Kool-Aid but a knockoff rival called Flavor Aid, a product of the Chicago-based Jel Sert Company. Flavor Aid still commands a sizeable share of stomach, as marketers like to say. But nobody says “Don’t drink the Flavor Aid,” do they?

Bill Ayers Should Avoid “Drinking the Kool-Aid”
by Matthew Vadum, American Spectator, 19 May 2009

Retired terrorist Bill Ayers, a kind of folk hero among today’s left, had a run-in with Washington Times editorial staffer Kerry Picket.

Picket’s encounter with the would-be mass murderer who plotted to bomb a crowded dance hall at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1970, was capturted on video.

The newspaper reported this about the brief interview with the former associate of President Obama:

When questioned by The Washington Times during a lecture on racism, Mr. Ayers went ballistic. “Did you drink the kool-aid over at The Times or are you okay?” he asked. “What I’m saying is … do you actually have a mind of your own?”

Drinking the kool-aid.

That’s an odd choice of words for Ayers. The expression came from the mass murder-suicide carried out by Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jones forced his congregation to drink poisoned flavored liquid.

Like Ayers, Jones was an America-hating revolutionary Communist. Jones left the U.S. and created what he hoped would be a socialist paradise in the Guyanese jungle. When things went awry, Jones decided it would be better to slaughter his followers than allow them to leave. More than 900 people died.

Jones remained a revolutionary Communist to the end. On an audio recording of the mass murder in progress, he can be heard attempting to reassure his followers: “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

Jones used religion to advance Marxism; Ayers uses the academy to advance Marxism.

Two different homicidal activists sharing a common ideal.

Maybe Ayers’s choice of words wasn’t so odd after all.

Oh mighty iPod Touch, we are not worthy
by Colby Cosh, National Post, 07 April 2009

There can hardly be a less appropriate popular cliché than saying you’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid.” Every time it is used, this phrase at once trivializes the Jonestown mass murder/suicide of 1978 and slanders a beloved brand that had no connection to the killings. Its use is defensible for only one reason: It captures a particular conceptual phenomenon perfectly, and no equally efficient or attractive alternative exists in English idiom.

So: I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid… By which I mean that I bought an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and have had my first direct experience of the legendary “childlike wonder” inspired by Apple computing products.

Drinking Kool-Aid not all bad
by Susan O’Bryan, Clinton (MS) News, 02 April 2009

Have you heard the phrase, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” a reference urging you not to buy into a set of beliefs? It references back to the 1978 mass suicide by Jim Jones followers, who drank a potassium cyanide-laced concoctions at the urging of their leader. The phrase has come to mean, “Don’t trust any group you find to be a little on the kooky side,” or “Whatever they tell you, don’t believe it too strongly,” according to urbandictionary.com In today’s business environment, it refers to the brainwashing of corporate leaders, poisoning water coolers with company rhetoric. In a gentler tone, it means accepting the challenges a company faces, and being part of the solution, not the problem.

Clever or crass?
by Steve Lundeberg, Albany (OR) Democrat Herald, 29 March 2009

Catchy phrases, even when they’re sort of tasteless, have a habit of working their way into the lexicon; another example is “drink the Kool-Aid,” a term for getting people to buy into one idea or another that comes from the mass suicide at Jonestown.

Now, I’m as sophomoric as the next guy – probably more than the next guy, as the co-workers who sit closest to me would probably attest – and I’ve never been accused of being a paragon of political correctness, but I would never use the term “going postal” or “drink the Kool-Aid.” Mass murder just isn’t funny to me, and neither is roughly 900 people killing themselves, especially when one of them was a loved one of a good friend of mine.

Cliche of the day: Kool-Aid
by Ray Frager, Baltimore Sun, 25 February 2009

…in which we highlight a well-worn, nonsensical or jargon-laden word or phrase that has been infecting the world of sports broadcasting.

Today’s phrase: “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

This description of an uncritical approach to a team can take on different colors, as in someone who is “drinking the purple Kool-Aid” when he takes as gospel anything coming out of the Ravens’ Castle and absolutely believes the team is always headed in the right direction.

In addition to being overused, the phrase trivializes an awful historical event — the mass suicides at Jonestown in 1978. Followers of the Rev. Jim Jones consumed a poison-laced, Kool-Aid-like drink at the cult’s compound in South America, where more than 900 people were found dead.