Influenca: Jonestown, Kabul, London Munich, Everybody talk about Pop Musik

 

I remember hearing the reports back from the horrors of the People's Temple mass suicide. Some I saw on tv but most poignantly I remember hearing the reports from the morning news in Dad's car as he drove me to school. The ABC voice, clipped and authortitative, a voice dressed in pinstripes, was like the sound of history to me. No one talks on the radio like that anymore. It would sound affected and fake. On those mornings, as that voice delivered fresh details the same way and time we got the morning bread and milk, I learned piece by piece about something that sounded like it was done by time travellers.

918 men, women and children died at a thing called the People's Temple run by someone with the roll call name of Jim Jones. Almost all of these deaths were suicides. The guy with the plain Jane name got them to do it. The developing picture revealed some mighty stresses placed upon the colony (which enlightened me on the existance and position of Guyana) and offered some motivation for Jones's command. But the thing missing, the shivery little whisper I heard whenever I heard anything about this event was why all those people killed themselves because they were asked nicely.

I knew of forced labour camps and worse where the victims outnumbered the guards but while saddened by it I had no real trouble understanding that no one among the victims wanted to step forward and be the next one shot. But this was different. People were poisoning their children and it wasn't just because they were afraid of being shot.

You can google the facts yourself and read it all but I'm posting about it here because in 1978 I, as a teen who considered himself cynical and worldly was terrified by it. I wasn't scared that 918 zombies would rise from their jungle graves and invade Australia. I was scared that such a thing could happen in the name of religion in that day and age. It was as though the population of medieval Paris had travelled through time and found itself surrounded by Saracens. It belonged to fiction yet the smell of the putresence of the corpses seem to waft from each new report.

At home, late 70s Townsville, this kind of thing was inconceivable. There were Mormons in white short sleeves and ties but they were jokes that no one let past the flyscreen. Anyone displaying more than an inherited reflex action religiosity was treated with suspicion as a possible fanatic. If it was too hot for sport it was too hot for that old fairy tale. The only church goer in my family, and an infrequent one at that, was my Mum. I never questioned her about her persistent faith because I just wasn't interested.

My point is that religion seemed old fashioned and quaint, like a bakelite radio with long passed stations identified on its dial. And over the waves somewhere with a name that sounded like it was somewhere else, almost a thousand people had killed themselves and their children for beliefs I thought were on the verge of extinction. That genuinely frightened me. It reminded me of the stories I heard of one apocalyptic branch of one of the many cults of Christianity who allegedly sold everything they had and waited on the sand of the sea on a particular day to be swept up by god. You were meant to find that story funny. I didn't. It made me think of Hitler and Stalin and Red China. It made me think of the fictional horror stories I used to read against my own advice.

But it got worse. The Shah of Iran was deposed after months of stormy civil unrest and mass action that exploded into revolution. The result? The modernising monarchy (not pure as the driven snow, mind you) lay in shards and discarded wrappers in the gutters while the country hurtled back toward the dark ages. Why? Religion. Violent religion. Great monolithic nightmare religion as creepy as the Jonestown flavour exploding like a squid's sperm sac over the land, lodging into the spinal cords of a people who had been well on the way to the kind of intellectual tolerance I had taken for granted where I was all my life. Well, at least it wasn't more oafish political hegemony. Vietnam has taught the whole world a thing or two.




December 1979, the Soviet army rolls into Afghanistan (admittedly at the resquest of the Afghan government). They will be there for ten years, brutal, ineffective and hated. Good thing we had that lesson otherwise it would only happen again.

The Apocalypse was around the corner and everything was going backwards. The seventeen year olds in The Monsoons are about to step up to their legal adulthood and greet a world that will not seem worth fighting for. Same as their real life counterparts. You didn't have to hang around uni students like I did to feel any of this, it was there in every news report. The default assumption was that we were among the last of the human race. This went unspoken but was a shared feeling.

It was remembering this feeling that gave me the middle act of The Monsoons. It's a kind of apocalypse by neglect, as though humanity cared so little for itself that it would bilthely vanish overnight. I felt anger over this but also resignation. I wished for the death of every ideologue and religious leader on the face of the earth and death to all who would take their places, wishing as agonisingly as for that one still-warm smile from an early ex girlfriend. And of course the more I wanted it the more remote it became.

We knew we would be heading into study or jobs. And then there was the strain of us that smiled knowingly and headed to the margins to live out whatever fell upon us. Those were our first careerists, the eco farmers, self-taught and self-sufficent connoisseurs of THC, the ones who dressed low but lived high while we shook hands with the Society Men of the Sunshine State. Want to see the end of the world? Watch it from the penthouse. Well, not quite but by comparision that's how it would have looked regardless of how alt we were with our George Orwell haircuts and op shop suits.

And, of course, it didn't happen. Everything just went on, including all the political tension, military action. The religion ebbed (but of course would flow freely a couple of decades later). And we just handed our assignments in or drew our pay.

But on the brink of all of that, the electoral roll, r-rated movies, drinking and hedonism that didn't have to be stolen, we didn't know it was just going to drone on. We thought we were going to inherit a cinderblock. We sang with M:

"Fix me a molotov, I'm on the hitline."