Jim Jones In Mendocino County

Another Anniversary of Jim Jones' mass murder of his black parishioners in Guyana was recorded on November 8th, but if it was noted anywhere I didn't see it. Usually the grisly event is squeezed by the media for the gold in its horror content with, as always, the media asking fatuous rhetorical questions like, “How Could It Have Happened?”

How could it not have happened in the media vacuum of the Northcoast, as willfully unseeing then as they are now. Jones should have been media-ambushed way back when he was beating children and looting the Mendocino County Welfare Department, way back when he was first picking up a financial head of steam in Redwood Valley via the cash cow care homes he established in no-questions-asked Mendocino County, maybe all the way back to Boonville where Jones taught the 5th grade for two years at the Anderson Valley Elementary School.

Presenting himself as a warm, wonderful human being doing what he could for healthy race relations in what he claimed was Ukiah's inland sea of roiling racism, Jones not only seduced the fuzzy warms — a pat on the head and an announcement that you are whatever you say you are will do it — he had the Rotary Club and the liberals singing choruses of mea culpas.

The man could hustle. He knew the race card would always come up trumps. Hell, maybe before he got into the speed he really was a good guy, but speed kills as the reverend established like no other tweaker before or since.

When Jones and his white inner circle persuaded their black co-religionists to join them for cyanide cocktails in the Guyana jungle, bureaucrats and judges back in Ukiah ran for their plausible deniabilties. They'd signed a lot of those dead black kids over to Jones, and they'd looked on as Jones, with Temple social workers waving the Temple on through, put his church on welfare benefits they didn't have coming.

And everyone in local authority ignored the persistent rumors of major craziness out at the alleged church in Redwood Valley, including faith healings, beatings, forced public sex and, my favorite, the gun tower. Jones erected beside his church where he'd occasionally post a couple of guys with rifles marching around. He'd tell the media saps that the tower guards were necessary because the “rednecks” were about to bum rush Sunday services, while the rednecks rightly assumed that the Jones gang was just another bunch of weirdos, not much different than other collectives of newly arrived oddballs then appearing everywhere in the county.

Looking back at the major unpunished crimes of Mendocino County — the Fort Bragg Fires, the bombing of Judi Bari, to name two —the common thread is zero pressure from the media to get the responsible people into court. Well, almost zero. The mighty AVA complained about the Fires and the travesty of the Bari case, but we're not the Press Democrat or KZYX, singly or in tandem as the two of them often occur. (The Fort Bragg Fires occurred before Mendocino County Public Radio so we can't blame KZYX's dependably cringing news service for that one.)

But KZYX, from its inception an echo chamber of correct opinion, managed to keep the false version of Bari events front and center for years, thus protecting the killer and financially benefiting the small claque of cult brains surrounding Bari in her last years.

Whenever bad things are allowed to happen blame the media first, then the DA, then the cops, then public education for removing the critical abilities of the past four generations of Americans.

I was new to Mendocino County when Jones was in Redwood Valley. I was, looking back on it, also a rather spectacular intra-racial show myself by rural standards, me with a house full of ethnic minorities. Jones must have heard about us and thought we were a natch for the People's Temple. He sent a delegation to Boonville to scope us out. We played a game of flag football with a People's Temple team. They probably beat us because they were heavy into sports. So were we but they had discipline.

The People's Temple recruiting team was led by a pretty young woman named Maria Katsaris. At Jonestown she would be described as Jones' mistress, as if she and Jones had stepped out of Anna Karenina. Miss Katsaris was Jones's dead mistress by then. She'd been right up on stage urging the church to drink their last Kool-Aid and check on out for an eternity with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Maria's father, Steve Katsaris, ran the large-scale children's institution in Ukiah called Trinity School, formerly an orphanage presided over by Catholic nuns. Katsaris was a Greek Orthodox priest. Maria later told the press he'd molested her, blaming dad for her escape to the lethal embrace of Jones. Maria was ahead of the recovered memory bullshit that came along a few years later as thousands of adult neurotics claimed dear old dad had fouled them, laying off their adult craziness on the old man. Was it Tolstoy who said that children over the age of thirty who are still blaming their parents are simply snivelers and hopeless dings?

The Temple was always denouncing people as perverts, a clear case of projection by Jones who was an amphetamine-driven pervert himself, once having been arrested for soliciting a cop in a public restroom.

When the perv accusations didn't work, they'd send a goon squad of young tough guys to knock on your door and woof in your face.

Most people around here at the time didn't know what to think about it all, but most people, especially liberals, have always been easily intimidated by unhappy persons of color, and totally blinded by happy persons of color, hence, eventually, Obama.

Maria Katsaris wanted to know if we cared to attend services in Redwood Valley. You had to be invited, you see, and she was extending the required invitation. Although houses of God are locked tight and have security cameras and tax exemptions, we'd never heard of one that was RSVP. And we weren't interested anyhow. We were more in tune with that great American deist, Daniel Webster, who built an entire theology on the idea of the acknowledgment of a supreme force without a dependent hierarchy of old men creeping around in black robes mumbling in Latin, nevermind the snake handlers and speakers in tongues and Jim Jones' we get at the more primitive levels of American worship. Webster was driven clear out of the country for his sensible opinions.

A homicidal social worker named Sharon Amos also invited us to the People's Temple. She would cut the throats of her three children, then slash her own jugular in Guyana where she functioned as Jones' gatekeeper in the capital of Georgetown. Ms. Amos, three years before she departed for Jonestown, told us that Jones delivered “amazing sermons” that could last five, seven, even eight hours. We simply must come to Redwood Valley to see and hear for ourselves.

We'd known people in San Francisco who could talk for two days. They were called speed freaks who, when they finally crashed, were often in a state of chemically induced paranoia that came to be known as “amphetamine psychosis.” Today's speed freaks are known as crankers or tweakers. They often tweak themselves into comparable states of amphetamine psychosis that certainly helped propel Jones to his last stand.

When the massacre went down in the jungles of Guyana, Guyana was recalled among the left as the country where the CIA had put a lot of money into overthrowing the socialist government of a man named Chedi Jagan. Jones always called himself a socialist, a fact ignored by Ukiah Rotary and the John Birch Society of inland Mendocino County who, among well-placed others, got Jones appointed foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury in 1967 by Judge Winslow, a liberal judge who was himself removed from the bench by conservative local voters unhappy with him for what they perceived as his liberal rulings. (When I asked at the Ukiah Library for that '67 Grand Jury report I was told it had been stolen long ago. it was long ago when I inquired so there may be a latter day copy available.)

By the time People's Temple got to Guyana the country was run by a straight up crook named Forbes Burnham who Jones bribed so the People's Temple could establish itself as an ag outpost on Guyanese rain forest land nobody wanted except the Indians who lived there.

Also at the time of the Jonestown murders, and Ukiah being a smaller, somehow more cohesive town than it is now, all of us who shopped over the hill noticed that people were missing — the produce guy at Safeway, intake clerks at the welfare office, a county road man, the lady at the Ward's Department store on South State Street. They were either dead or in hiding.

People haven't changed. Mendocino County hasn't changed. (In its way, Mendocino County is even wackier, I'd say.) The media haven't changed. They're in the prone position, down from bended knee. Something like Jones could happen again. The internet has made us even more gullible, and the local echo chamber of cool-o opinion is ever larger, and Mendocino County is still the place where history starts all over again every day and you are whatever you say you are. Jones knew that the day he got here.

A brief word for Tim Stoen. People tell me all the time that Tim Stoen, once an Assistant DA for the County and before that, County Counsel, is hiding big secrets. He isn't. Stoen was also victim of Jones, a triple victim you could say, because Jones first appropriated Stoen's wife, then he appropriated Stoen's son, and then he murdered Stoen's son. Tim Stoen has known more tragedy than most of us, and he's always deserved to be left alone.

As for the bigshot Democrats seduced by Jones, Willie Brown's solipsistic look-back in a Sunday Chronicle on an anniversary of the murders: “It's that time of year again,” Brown began. “The anniversary stories are rolling out, and one word says it all: 'Jonestown.' Jim Jones and Jonestown were a real tragedy for George Moscone, for me, for John and Phil Burton, for all of us. We had all gone over to Jones' church on Geary Boulevard. George even put him on the Housing Authority. Jones did have an incredible following at the Peoples Temple and was a real pastor for diversity and for poor people. What happened in Guyana was just horrible for us. We were obviously embarrassed at our lapse of judgment, our lapse of objectivity, our lapse of due diligence. We had no explanation for how stupid we were. We couldn't even be responsible to all these relatives whose folks had died. For San Francisco, and those of us on the elected side, it was a very, very tough time.”

Boo-hoo. Jonestown as a tragedy for Willie Brown and the Democrats. Brown's narcissistic perspective is almost as crazy as Jones was.

The three best books on Jones are Journey To Nowhere by Shiva Naipul; The Life and Death of Jim Jones by James Reston Jr.; and Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by John Jacobs and Tim Reiterman.