A Few Random Thoughts on “Drink the Kool-Aid” as a Political Metaphor

Recently, in the agonizing run-up to this God-forsaken election [1], I’ve been coming across the idiom “Drink the Kool-Aid” much more often than I’d like or even expect. Accordingly, I took it upon myself to express my indignation.

Before clowns got creepy

Then I thought: Do I even know what it means, really? Where did the phrase come from? I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure people who have been using the phrase were sure. (I’ve become forgetful in my geezerhood.) And so, like so many of us do when we aren’t sure, I resorted to Wikipedia:

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. The phrase often carries a negative connotation. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. The phrase originates from events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. [Italics mine.] The movement's leader, Jim Jones, called a mass meeting at the Jonestown pavilion after the murder of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and others in nearby Port Kaituma. Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs which had been prepared by his aides.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Hodge-podge of lethal equipment found at Jonestown,
collectively called "Kool-Aid".

Gulp! [2]. Oh, Jesus, the Jonestown Massacre. Now I remember.

But ah! Drinking Kool-Aid didn’t always mean mass psychosis, murder, and suicide. When I was a kid in the fifties, lots of moms—and I mean millions of moms--actually made for it for their kids, usually on hot summer days. It was fun! Never mind that it was mostly (moistly) sugar. Here are the directions, taken from a 1950s package of the stuff: “Empty contents into large pitcher. Add 1 cup sugar. Add COLD water and ice to make 2 quarts.” A rough mental calculation will bring you to the quick realization that it was a lot of unrefined sugar—tons and tons, literally--consumed by millions of boys and girls in the fifties. In fact, it was part a sugar-eating binge of unprecedented scale, one of the first contributors to poor nutrition, obesity and a host of other life-style diseases that we baby-boomers are suffering from now. Those were the days of drinking Kool-Aid. Literally.

With due gratitude, I must note that my own grandma and mom refused to make sugared Kool-Aid for us. Even to them, wasting a whole cup of sugar on snotty kids seemed unacceptably profligate. They’d been through the Depression and the War, when sugar was rationed, and in their minds it was still a precious commodity. Sugar production skyrocketed during the fifties and it became just unhealthy junk.

So, to their everlasting credit, God bless them, they never gave us Kool-Aid. However, Big Sugar found plenty of other ways to get their evil product into the bloodstreams of us innocent kids: At the corner store, we’d get soda pop, five-cent candy bars, sheets of bubble gum inside every pack of baseball cards, God-knows-what-else forms of sugary treats. And perhaps the most pernicious of delivery methods, right at home: Breakfast cereal. My favorite was Coco-Puffs.

But I digress (and will digress again). Another reason I don’t like the phrase “Drink the Kool-Aid” (in its modern sense) is that it grates against my fond memories of my acid-dropping days. For those of you who weren’t around in the 60s and 70s, I refer again to the Wikipedia entry:

“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe depicting the life of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The book's title is a reference to an acid test in Watts, California, where the Pranksters spiked a batch of Kool-Aid with the psychedelic drug LSD in the 1960s.”

I admit I took LSD quite often in my green youth. I liked it; it was fun; I don't regret it. (See my previous blog entry “The Astronaut and the Acid-Head” at https://tomatopointe.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-astronuat-and-acid-head.html).

Therefore, I resented the appropriation of the term has been by those who were never there and never had a chance to enjoy the experience. And I must emphasize that in whatever form I ingested that wacky, admittedly mind-altering drug, it was never actually dissolved in Kool-Aid. No matter; after Wolfe’s book, everybody knew what “Electric Kool-Aid” meant.

Kesey enjoyin' a Kool-Pop inside Further

But back to the phrase as a political metaphor. When you think about the cause/effect chronology of tragedies like Jonestown, it doesn’t make sense. Jones’s followers didn’t literally drink the Kool-Aid [3] until after they’d been gaslit and indoctrinated. By the time they were murdered/killed themselves, it was already too late. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” was the result, not the cause, of the brainwashing.

Likewise, in 1930s Germany (before real Kool-Aid had been invented), the German people who had been gaslit by Der Fuhrer and cronies, and who supported the Nazi agenda, had not yet “drunk the Kool-Aid.” That came later, in the forties, when German soldiers froze to death in Russia, when Allied bombs destroyed whole cities, when women and children starved, when Hitler and his posse killed themselves in a Berlin bunker. World-wide, some 50,000,000 human beings had to “drink the Kool-Aid” because a much smaller number of people had been brainwashed by homicidal ideologues. Again, it was the result: Death, destruction, despair on a scale never seen in human history. The cruel irony of those times, of all times, is that the vast majority of Kool-Aid drinkers were not the ones who mixed it, stirred it, served it--and forced us to drink it at gunpoint.

It’s difficult not to draw a parallel between those cases, however extreme, and recent political events here in the U.S.—a parallel which I need hardly explain. But here goes, anyway: The American people didn’t “drink the Kool-Aid” when they elected Trump in 2016. We’re drinking it now: Yesterday (Oct. 28): More than a thousand Covid-19 deaths in one day. A quarter of a million deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, Now, a reasonable person (of any political persuasion) might (and should) ask: How responsible for these deaths (and not just the deaths, but the widespread attendant suffering of loved ones and society as a whole) are Trump and his associates? I’ve answered the question for myself, but for those of you readers who are still wondering, I refer you to a recently published study by a group of doctors at Columbia University:

“Our comparative analysis estimates that somewhere between 130,000 and 210,000 American deaths to date could have been avoided.

"The weight of this enormous failure ultimately falls to the leadership at the White House – and among a number of state governments – which consistently undercut the efforts of top officials at the CDC and HHS. Further, there is little evidence to suggest that science-based policies will prevail going forward with Donald Trump as President given his continued attacks on science and government scientists.”

Please read the whole document at:

https://ncdp.columbia.edu/custom-content/uploads/2020/10/Avoidable-COVID-19-Deaths-US-NCDP.pdf

(And thank you my friend, John Michel, for leading me to the study.)

Now, you might (if you are young and healthy, bless your hearts!) say, “Yes, but the average age of death is like 80 years old! They’re gonna die anyway…of something. We’re gonna be OK…probably. Just like a bad case of the flu. Suck it up, you whinin' old fuckin' boomers!” Yes, yes, quite true. We all have to “drink the Kool-Aid” someday. And after all, it’s not like it was at Jonestown, where little children and their moms convulsed and screamed in agony when the men forced them to drink the Kool-Aid. Not like the many thousands of A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, young and old, who, if they were lucky, were incinerated instantly, and if they were not so lucky, died in agony from the slower effects of burns and radiation. However, it’s a demonstrable fact that even us old people don’t enjoy suffering and dying in hospital wards, palliative care notwithstanding, isolated from our families and friends. And we will know who stirred up the Kool-Aid and made us drink it.

****************

NOTES:

[1] I really can’t detect God having any direct influence in this election or any other. If Biden/Harris win, and the Senate flips Democratic, I may be willing to change my mind. Come on, Lord!

[2] Gulp! Unintended sub-metaphor.

[3] There is not much evidence that the actual brand Kool-Aid was the primary murder/suicide weapon. Wikipedia: “Present-day descriptions of the event sometimes claim the beverage was not as Kool-Aid but Flavor Aid,[15] a less-expensive product from Jel Sert reportedly found at the site.[16] Kraft Foods, the maker of Kool-Aid, has stated the same.[17][18] Implied by this accounting of events is that the reference to the Kool-Aid brand owes exclusively to its being better-known among Americans. Others are less categorical.[15] Both brands are known to have been among the commune's supplies: Film footage shot inside the compound prior to the events of November shows Jones opening a large chest in which boxes of both Flavor Aid and Kool-Aid are visible.[19] Criminal investigators testifying at the Jonestown inquest spoke of finding packets of "cool aid" (sic), and eyewitnesses to the incident are also recorded as speaking of "cool aid" or "Cool Aid."[20] However, it is unclear whether they intended to refer to the actual Kool-Aid–brand drink or were using the name in a generic sense that might refer to any powdered flavored beverage.”

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Misc. Refs:

DEFINITION

1. informal

demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty to someone or something.

"his real ire is directed at the news media for drinking the Kool-Aid and not being tougher on the president"

During this time, aides prepared a large metal tub with grape Flavor Aid, poisoned with Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide ^[157] and Phenergan.^[158] About 30 minutes after Marceline Jones's announcement, Jim Jones made his own, calling all members immediately to the pavilion.

Flavor Aid is a non-carbonated soft drink beverage made by The Jel Sert Company in West Chicago, Illinois. It was introduced in 1929.^[1] It is sold throughout the United States as an unsweetened, powdered concentrate drink mix, similar to Kool-Aid brand drink mix.

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is a phrase suggesting that one has mindlessly adopted a dogma of a group or a (cult) leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications. The backdrop of this are events culminating in the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. At Jonestown, Guyana, followers of Jim Jones' Temple drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of "Kool Aid", cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium, Phenergan, and chloral hydrate.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe depicting the life of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The book's title is a reference to an acid test in Watts, California, where the Pranksters spiked a batch of Kool-Aid with the psychedelic drug LSD in the 1960s.^[21]