The_c.o.w.s.

The Katherine Massey Book Club @ The C.O.W.S. hosts the 5th study session on Michael Meiers' Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment. This infamous mass murder has countless parallels to our recent literary selections - Columbine, Michael Swango, and The Hart murder-suicide. The Rev. Jim Jones, a White man born in Indiana, took a thousand people from California to Guyana, South America. On November 18th, 1978, Jones killed nearly all 1,000 of his mostly black followers and Congressman Leo Ryan. A few were shot, but most were poisoned with cyanide, just like "Double-0 Swango." For nearly half a century, this event has been conventionally understood as a bunch of brainwashed black loons following a White charlatan to their demise in the jungle. Meiers' work suggests something far more nefarious. Last week, Meiers detailed the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Central Intelligence Agency's Counter Intelligence Programs of the 1960's and 70's aimed at controlling and observing black and non-white people aro