\u201cIn order to talk \u2013 or even think \u2013 about almost anything, it is necessary to use metaphors,\u201d writes linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. <\/i>\u201cMetaphor is not just a matter of words, but a major mode of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Americans and others talk about \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid,\u201d they partake of metaphor often without acknowledgment. \u201cMost of the time we are not even aware we are doing it, since most metaphorical thought is automatic and below the level of consciousness,\u201d says Lakoff.<\/p>\n
Thirty years after than 900 human beings died at Jonestown after drinking poison mixed into a fruit drink concoction \u2013 mistakenly referred to as Kool-Aid, it was actually a powdered fruit concentrate from Great Britain called Flavor Aid \u2013 \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid\u201d has come to mean \u201cswallowing the company line,\u201d in one definition, or \u201cblindly going along with the majority without voicing one\u2019s opposition\u201d in another.<\/p>\n
For many Americans born after 1978, or those too young to have conscious memory of that time, \u201cJonestown\u201d is a word without particular meaning, or perhaps it refers to towns in Pennsylvania and Texas. However, \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid\u201d is embedded in today\u2019s popular vocabulary. It is on its way to becoming what George Orwell, in his 1946 essay, \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d called a \u201cdead metaphor.\u201d<\/p>\n
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically \u201cdead\u201d has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.<\/p>\n
For readers of this online journal, I realize that the Kool-Aid metaphor is not dead at all, but a phrase that evokes with extreme vividness the fleshly children, elderly, families, and struggling individuals who participated in the final \u201cWhite Night\u201d ritual in Guyana. Some readers may visualize their family members and friends on the boardwalk near the vat, an oversized tin bucket in which death awaited those who had years before chosen to participate in a communal experience of living, a scene transforming before their horrified or numbed or depressed or resigned or resistant bodies into a communal experience of dying, on a humid afternoon in November 1978.<\/p>\n
For today\u2019s Jonestown community \u2013 American and otherwise, scholars and artists and journalists in addition to Peoples Temple extended family and friends \u2013 drinking the Kool-Aid remains a literal and visceral description of an unfathomable moment in recent history.<\/p>\n
Unfathomable, yet wholly and horribly real.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince our metaphors often hide important aspects of reality,\u201d writes Lakoff, \u201cwe need to know what they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
What then does the Kool-Aid metaphor eclipse?<\/p>\n
It disappears 909 lives of accumulated experience and wisdom. It conceals yet another example in a long line of America\u2019s utopian experiments-turned-dystopia, in which ends cannot justify means. It hides what we, collectively, as a culture of diverse peoples of the 21st century, wish to forget.<\/p>\n
In the pavilion at Jonestown, above the bodies of the dead and Jim Jones\u2019s empty throne, photographers captured the sign reading \u201cThose who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,\u201d philosopher George Santayana\u2019s celebrated dictum regarding our duty to study history. The irony of this statement crowning the hundreds of corpses is not lost on any viewer of these images.<\/p>\n
And yet, endlessly, we forget the past, and repeat it.<\/p>\n
(Annie Dawid<\/strong>\u2019s novel of Jonestown, <\/i>Paradise Undone, awaits a publisher. Her author’s page on Amazon is here<\/a>. Her complete collection of writings for <\/i>the jonestown report may be found here<\/a>. She may be reached at annie@anniedawid.com<\/a>. Her website is at http:\/\/www.anniedawid.com\/<\/a>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIn order to talk \u2013 or even think \u2013 about almost anything, it is necessary to use metaphors,\u201d writes linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. \u201cMetaphor is not just a matter of words, but a major mode of thought.\u201d When Americans and others talk about \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid,\u201d they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31411,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31361","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31361"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133963,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31361\/revisions\/133963"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}