Take Me To Your Leader (I Don't Have One)

I constantly find articles saying "Hollywood is a breeding ground for cults".

But - even after all of our insane, and deadly, interactions with Charles Manson, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, The Family, Your Black Muslim Bakery, and more - I can't find articles saying America's doing anything to combat the nasty influence of cults, or cultism.

These NewAge Nazi followers are out-of-control, now, but been that way my whole life - I was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles - right in Hollywood's shadow, so I know:

Cults are the unspoken "why", to why things are, the way they are.

 

The Understatement Of The Day On Trump (And Probably The Last Five Years)

"It's a mistake, and not helpful to anyone, to label Trump a 'cult leader' and say his supporters are somehow 'brainwashed'."

So said Rick Ross, the #1 cult expert in the world. It looks especially bad if that's a defense for the political party of Jim Jones and the People's Temple, One Taste, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Oprah, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, the Clintons, and more indefensible NewAge cult nonsense than a dowser could shake a stick at.

The Democrat Party also has a very serious "projection" problem. 

Bumbaclot

Cultural cues (or a lack thereof) in America are wicked, man.

Wicked insane - like the San Francisco Chronicle did an article on Congresswoman Jackie Spear's investigation of poverty, never once mentioning she was one of the people shot rescuing blacks from The People's Temple Jonestown cult commune, led by that crazy white man, Jim Jones. 

HUGE American cultural blind spot.

  “I’m still kind of reeling from the experience. Every member of Congress should be required to do what I did. It would help us  appreciate who we are talking about. We rattle off numbers, but it doesn’t speak about the people themselves.”

Or like blacks having had less than 50 years of actual freedom - though a lot has happened - but it hasn't been the long time, or the clean cut, white people seem to think. They also don't seem concerned it ends well.

  Police Facebook 'shows trainees blacked-up, wearing Nazi uniforms and making racist and homophobic jokes' 

 Because, whites, only being honest ends well.

  “America is much more willing to acknowledge what happened in the past: ‘We freed the slaves! It’s all good!’ But to say: ‘We are still unnecessarily killing black men’ – let’s have a conversation about that.” 

Only being honest brings understanding.

  Almost every single song we put out it was a struggle and a fight. Le Freak, our biggest single, we played that record for the record company and every one of them tried to talk us into changing it or releasing something else. And that's the only triple-platinum single in the history of Atlantic Records! They couldn't hear it, and the reason was, they couldn't compare it to anything else going on. 

 Only by being honest are whites the folks blacks can trust. 

“Those who opened an email from former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) on Wednesday expecting an announcement that he is running for Senate in New Hampshire received a surprise instead: a message from a doctor and noted vaccination opponent claiming that vaccines, and even too much exercise, lead to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Even with the whites who are nice and understanding, "whites" becoming nice and understanding doesn't happen overnight. 

“Officials at a Northern California private school are apologizing after a controversial lunch menu option to celebrate Black History Month. …a menu of fried chicken, cornbread and watermelon,…”

Some didn't have to, obviously, but a lot still insist on being a major pains in the ass, culturally.

“Subway said it will stop using azodiacarbonamide, a chemical used in the production of foamed plastics like yoga mats and rubber-soled shoes, in its bread.”

We live in the shadow of "the peculiar institution", and it gets no less peculiar as time goes on - mostly because those whites keep insisting there's nothing going on - when they've got all our money and we've got all their problems.

“The institution of slavery and colonization has had many adverse effects on Americans of African descent. The psychological toll that institutionalized servitude and oppression has had on African Americans, can partially be blamed for the sub par success rate of many African Americans.”

Who even thinks Americans could or should support that?

“There are no monuments to Stokely Carmichael’s activism, but there should be. As a 24-year-old revolutionary on a Mississippi highway, he changed the course of American history. Black power offered a bold prescription for political, social, cultural and economic transformation. It challenged black people, including King, to find beauty and strength in African culture and to take their political ambitions to new, far-reaching heights.”

Whites actually have the nerve to complain - complain - about other's envy as they parade the proceeds of our ancestor's very lives before us.

“You are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

And they don't "get" it, their talk filled with "principles" and pious nonsense anyone can see they don't live by.

“Does the stress of living in a white-dominated society make African Americans get sick and die younger than their white counterparts? Apparently, yes.”

Those that believe in God wallow in sin, so deep, they should be on their knees never to rise again.

“I can remember accurately the very first set of books that really impressed me. I have since bought that set of books and have it home for my children to read as they grow up. It's called Wonders of the World. It's full of pictures of archeological finds, statues that depict, usually, non-European people.”

Instead, they lecture - what's wrong with them?

“The least expected aspect of The Whipping Man, a searing drama about slavery, war, poverty, racism, torture, gangrene, and unanesthetized amputation is that it’s frequently hilarious.”

Along with keeping us slaves, and keeping us from reading, did they also think we'd never put two-and-two together?

“Hillary Clinton Is Already Looking To Get Black People To Vote For Her”

Don't answer that - doesn't matter - justice will be served:

While we're all re-learning resiliency,…

 

Somebody's Got A Serious Sense Of Humor Out There

First, it was Rob Ford, and now this:

"Podesta apologizes for Jonestown crack"

Surely, it's nothing to kill yourself over,...

 

I'll Die Living Under Lies (Like The Skies Over My Grave)

Well I'll be damned (and I will) someone else who was there has a memory of our real history, swirling under the lies they sell kids, on TV and at the movies:

Interestingly, [Cult leader Jim Jones] may well have been the inspiration for the rainbow flag, which flies prominently above Harvey Milk Plaza today, and thousands of others locations throughout the Western world. The history of the flag, first designed and sewed by Milk’s personal friend Gilbert Baker, is obscure (intentionally perhaps?), but Jones was fond of proclaiming himself to be head of the “rainbow family.” It is not at all far-fetched to suppose that it was Jim Jones who introduced the term to Milk and Baker, and hence the idea for the flag, which first flew in 1978, a few months before the Jonestown massacre and Milk’s assassination. Further supporting Milk’s connection with Jones is the strange and macabre fact that Milk’s ashes were mixed with grape kool-aid before being scattered into the sea. 

 

Very little of this history makes its way into the official story. I am glad I avoided the film Milk, and not because I object to the subject matter, but because learning about the lies of omission (Jim Jones was out of the picture) would have ruined it for me. Sometimes, historians get closer to the truth than those who lived it, because they are not constrained by political loyalties, taboos, and personal concerns. Hopefully, when enough time has passed and Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown and Jerry Brown are but memories, someone will produce a film that truly does justice to the urban political revolution of the 1970s, which was the seed out of which the contemporary progressive machine emerged. 

 

On looking back, it seems to me that Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown, despite their political achievements, remain in the shadow of Jim Jones. For all their success and determination, they were children under the same father, following a vision they didn’t come up with themselves. Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown may have lived to see another day, but they, too, drank the kool-aid.

They all did - and they're still slurping it to this day - shit:

The only thing America's doing now, that Jones wouldn't approve of, is thinking he was the bad guy,...

 

Acting? Who Said Anything About Acting? Fuck Acting

 

Whew Boy. The Dallas Buyer's Club. Slate's talking Matthew McConaughey Oscar bait, while Slant knows - having been here before - that can only mean one thing:

"One could argue that the AMA and Big Pharma, with their endless pockets and insurmountable lobbying power, have fought their battle against natural medicine, chiropractors, and any other voices of marginal dissent so unfairly for so long that the most effective response is necessarily one-sided. But if you're appealing to the reason of the consumer, and if you intend to respect the intelligence of your audience, sacrificing intelligent debate for the sake of impassioned delivery reduces the intellectual substance of your arguments drastically."

Discuss amongst yourselves - Slate even admits the lie:

"In reality, though the FDA did warn AIDS patients about one of Woodroof’s drugs in particular, they seem to have largely taken a 'look the other way' approach with Woodroof and his club."

Like Milk - which really should've mentioned Jim Jones and The People's Temple - for some reason, somebody's trying to feed us a line, here, again. Why do they keep doing that?

I don't know who all is in on it, or probably what's-what, even - no name on it like "Lee Daniels' 'The Butler'" - all I know, for sure, is this much: 

Slant opens with "new-age-y" and that's good enough for me,...

"Ha-Ha! How's It Feel To Know You've Been Cheated?"

Now that we've got the whole "gay" marriage thing out of the way, and can go back to telling the truth, here's the Harvey Milk biopic I'd pay to see:

No political figures were more gushing in their praise of [cult leader Jim Jones] than Willie Brown and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s rising tribune of gay freedom. Milk, a perennial candidate for office until he finally won a supervisor’s seat in 1977, aggressively sought Jones’s political blessing. “Our paths have crossed,” Milk wrote Jones during an earlier campaign for supervisor, in a letter filled with the kind of awed reverence that the cult leader demanded from his followers. “They will stay crossed. It is a fight that I will walk with you into . . . The first time I heard you, you made a statement: ‘Take one of us, and you must take all of us.’ Please add my name.” 

Not content to hear dignitaries whisper flatteries into his ear, Jones staged a testimonial banquet in his own honor and demanded that politicians in his debt offer him public tribute. On the evening of September 25, 1976, the Peoples Temple headquarters on Geary Boulevard was converted into a formal dining hall with linen tablecloths and floral arrangements. At the head table sat Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Freitas, and Assemblyman Willie Brown, who acted as the evening’s exuberant master of ceremonies. As he introduced the man of the hour to the overflow audience, Brown reached new heights of shameless, ass-kissing puffery. “Let me present to you,” Brown roared, “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao.” By the time Jones rose to tumultuous applause, he seemed likely to walk on water.

Can you picture it? I can picture it. A lot of reds. C'mon, you've just gotta get the feeling. Where's Oliver Stone when you need him? Michael Moore? We need a re-revisionary:

Because Milk and Moscone were murdered so soon after the Jonestown tragedy, there was immediate speculation that Peoples Temple was somehow involved. Ann Kronenberg, Milk’s hand- picked successor, told Milk biographer Randy Shilts, that when she first heard Milk was murdered, she thought Jim Jones was responsible. Rumors began to circulate (and some persist today) of obscure connections between Jim Jones and Milk’s murderer, Dan White. Vague rumors of a falling out between Milk and Jones also surfaced. One story has it that Milk asked Peoples Temple to remove his name from the church’s list of supporters when reports of violence and theft first came to light, and that he was outraged when the Temple failed to comply with his demand. Eventually, history settled on an official story: Jim Jones was a master manipulator who used unwitting local politicians to gain power for himself. The politicians, including Milk and Moscone, used Jones for volunteers and votes, while remaining personally distant and blissfully unaware of rumors of Temple violence, abuse, theft and even murder. The timing of Dan White’s murderous rampage was deemed coincidental. 

 

However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that Harvey Milk was a strong advocate for Peoples Temple and Jim Jones during his political career, including the tumultuous year leading up to the Jonestown tragedy. Milk spoke at the Temple often, wrote personal letters to Jim Jones, contacted other elected officials on the Temple’s behalf, and used space in his weekly column to support the works of the Temple, even after the negative New West article went to press. Milk appeared in the pages of the Peoples Forum, the Temple newspaper, and received over fifty letters of sympathy from the residents of Jonestown when his lover, Jack Lira, killed himself in September 1978. 



It is readily apparent from the letters and historical memorabilia that Milk and the Temple enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship until their concurrent deaths. Why then is the relationship such a secret, even taboo to discuss? The only biography of Milk to date, The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilts, downplays the Milk/Temple relationship, even going so far as to paint Milk as one of the countless people who cruelly ridiculed and ostracized the surviving Temple members and their supporters. Like most historians, Shilts opted for an image of an expedient politician, instead of truthfully portraying how Milk worked with Peoples Temple until the end of his life. 

 

Enough time has passed since Milk’s brutal murder to reanalyze this relationship, to explore how and why Harvey Milk supported Peoples Temple,...Harvey Milk irrefutably supported Peoples Temple. 



It may be understandable why in November 1978 the supporters of Milk would attempt to distance the newly martyred supervisor from the still-unfolding horrors of Jonestown. However, we as witnesses, historians, researchers and writers have an obligation to tell future generations the whole truth, as we understand it, to record as much documentation as possible and let the biases and subsequent interpretations transform over time,... 

 

If Milk supported Peoples Temple, now is the pivotal time for us to unveil the truth,...It is most important that we not participate in or settle for the revisionism and obfuscation that has passed for the historical account of this relationship to date.

You mean like Will & Grace covered for - oh, never mind,...

 

Nobody's Talking - Or Saw Anything (Everything's Fine)

 

 Ha-ha! Like a fish to honey, I think I done found me another book to read:

My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults in a decade feeling the hangover of the Summer of Love and suffering the fallout of the nuclear family. I was five when Charles Manson was sentenced to life for the murders committed by his Family of former hippies, pretty girls whose minds had been opened and broken. I was in Junior High when the bodies were discovered in Jonestown, the jungle commune in Guyana where Reverend Jim Jones had hoped to build a new Eden. I will never forget the shape of them, lying flat and embracing, all having drunk poison punch at his command. I wondered how it was possible to have such faith, such all-consuming, passionate awful faith that you would follow such a leader, however charismatic he was. 

The history of American faith is filled with charismatic leaders, eager to change the world and to destroy it. In a nation founded by religious radicals in search of freedom, we are raised to believe and raised to protect the right to believe at all costs. The faithful pushed their wagons into the empty west, missionaries and prophets spreading the word, building utopian societies with a violent certainty. The Mormon pioneers irrigated and settled an uninhabitable land of salt lakes. Their communal, utopian church would split over the practice of polygamy, which stood in opposition to the government and statehood. The recent raids on the fundamentalist Mormon Yearning for Zion Ranch of Warren Jeffs in Texas reminds us of the history of secret societies, with young women in pioneer dresses, trapped in cycles generations old, of men who must have multiple wives to attain the highest levels of heaven, a tenet of faith revealed by the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith. 

In a post-war world, our faiths have turned darker and deadlier. We have grabbed hold of our freedom with both hands. Urbanization has led to isolation, to a rootless people in search of connection, estranged from the families that might have cautioned them or saved them. New cults formed in cities with followers drawn to a range of new gurus, Sun Myung Moon, Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, “Fathers” Yod and David “Moses” Berg, Werner Erhard and his Est. All have been accused of a range of abuses, sexual, physical, mental, financial. Groups were made through abduction and maintained through brainwashing. New Age communes developed on the fringes, where charismatic men gathered harems and drugs provided the only escape.

And now - after all that - I'm supposed to accept the rest of these fools didn't also get a heavy cultural dose of the Kool-Aid, when it's remnants, in various forms, are all around for anyone to plainly see? They must be joking! The West walked into it willingly:

"I don't believe in Beatles!"

When "Revenge Is A Dish Served Cold" Just Might Work

I told you. There's movies about cults, TV shows about cults, books about cults, and now - Cult Pizza:

"The vegan chef is again going for the artistic jugular by hanging portraits in his new Cult Pizza shop of notorious cult leaders including David Koresh, Roch Theriault, and a photo of people who died at Jonestown."

I know - even more than addressing the disgust some may have by being reminded of who they are, and what they've done, over dinner - there's only one really important issue here: 

 Who in the fuck eats vegan pizza?

 

The Best And The Brightest (That, We Ain't Getting,...)

It's not exactly the mayor of San Francisco appointing Jim Jones, the leader of The People's Temple cult, to government - or even another mayor of San Francisco dating a cultist (and giving another cult leader a day in his honor) while endorsing gay marriage during an affair with his campaign manager's wife - but if you say so:

In a city known for producing some of America's biggest political scoundrels, the NYC mayor's race scandal is the most idiotic and delusional scheme ever concocted

I have to admit, the fact stupidity's now a competition is starting to raise a smile,...

 

A Black Day At The Beach (No Passing The Sun Screen!)

Since it's pretty obvious Teen America (as opposed to Team America) is now procrastinating by lurching, zombie-like, through this low-boil firearms hysteria (there's always gotta be something) I won't bother anyone with what I've been doing lately - except to mention looking into Alabama 3, the crew who penned the immortal words "You Woke Up This Morning And Got Yourself A Gun" AKA The Soprano's much-loved theme song.

See I, too, like brains - and aim to keep mine, thanks.

Nope, all I want noticed is how far afield this English band is in other, more substantive, TMR-like ways than simply acknowledging the West's long-standing proclivity for flying lead. Namely, when it comes to dealing directly with Teen America's issues of belief, A3 also seems more than capable enough - curiously, I might add - though they still can't rap for shit.

(All the atheists in the house say, "Amen, well I'll be damned" - no, really, we will be. I'm positive. Don't worry about it. They got all this stuff wrong. It's like a pin-prick at best. Think of it like this: Getting your flu shot/Getting Damned - same thing.)

Seriously, I didn't even have to ask, beg, plead, show a little leg, please, God, or Oprah - whichever comes first in the phone book - would it be possible for A3 to add just a smidgen of Jim Jones into the mix? Please, please, oh pretty please, just for me? A little cult hectoring from The People's Temple leader himself and - I swear, you know I do - like global warming, Walking For A Cure to ________, and We Are All One But Obama Is "The One" theology, I'll believe in you, forever and ever!

       Nope, there was none of that, all I did was think "this would be nice" and the rest was magick:

That, my friends, is what I call being metaphysically Cool-y School-y w/The Universe!

I am obviously a great and powerful MahaCracki now and - since I know it's about people - I aim to stay out of the "gun" debate. I have clearly gained too much cult mental power to be contained by mere debate. It's like, wow, awesome. I just think of stuff and it happens. Just like that. A3? Too easy. A test case that was just too easy. Now I think, what if I wanted to start a fire - with my mind? Or what about this:

The entire planet becoming dedicated to the sentiments of Hallmark cards - through song!

  Man, Brian Wilson and I could be pals right now, but probably shouldn't be. Fucking hippie.

I'd wear a helmet but the world's an ugly enough place as it is,...