Quenching the desire to ‘drink the Kool-Aid’
Drunk any Kool-Aid lately? Or maybe you accused someone else of doing it? If so, congratulations, you’re right in step with one of the nation’s most popular idiomatic trends. A snappy, fruit-flavored way of referring to someone who unquestioningly embraces a particular leader or ideology, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has become a staple of self-righteous public discourse.
Bill O’Reilly is fond of the expression, as is Washington Times columnist Marybeth Hicks, whose new book “Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid” warns that “frightening percentages of our kids” believe that Christianity is “just plain mean.” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was recently said to have drunk “the company Kool-Aid” when he finally joined Google+, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz admitted in a recent interview that he “drank the Kool-Aid as much as anyone else about Obama.”
Finally, in a sobering portent of the divorce announcement that shook the world earlier this month, Us Weekly reported that within just 72 days of their $10-million wedding, reality star Kim Kardashian and her husband, Kris Humphries, were “not getting along at all” because “Kris is not drinking the Kardashian Kool-Aid.”
Such intransigence may have cost Humphries his marriage, but in different circumstances it might have saved his life. That’s because, apparently unbeknown to just about everyone who uses the expression, “drinking the Kool-Aid” isn’t some kitschy nod to 1970s junk-food or the mind-altering effects of citric acid. It comes from an event that, until Sept. 11, 2001, marked America’s single greatest loss of civilian life in a non-natural disaster, the Jonestown massacre.
On Nov. 18, 1978, in a remote Guyana compound, more than 900 members of the People’s Temple followed the orders of their leader, Jim Jones, and drank powdered grape punch (actually the cheap Kool-Aid knockoff Flavor-Aid) mixed with chemicals that included cyanide and Valium. So in Jones’ thrall were his followers that they poisoned their babies and toddlers first, using syringes to squirt the liquid into the children’s mouths. In most cases, death occurred within five minutes.