It has been most noticeable in the 24/7 news wars that election coverage brings out more talking and time filling by pundits and reporters as they dispense with other forms of news. They need to fill vast amounts of time with less and less information. Naturally, conversational qualities take over as there are a limited number of topics to discuss. What has struck me in the last few years is that talking heads have a tendency to repeat things that they have heard, many times repeating each other. It is brought into specific relief by the vocabulary we hear. People are very identifiable in terms of their facility with language by their vocabulary.

It is almost like an educational fingerprint. When you hear words that you know, but almost never hear in normal conversation, they sort of stand out. It seems with each election the heads listen to each other, and some “good word” they almost forgot creeps into the lexicon. I find it ironic that the major complaint about the blogosphere is that it is “rampant opinion with little means of verifiable of fact” and yet I don’t see a lot of difference when it comes to television. At least in the blogosphere you can talk back, and it is fairly simple to see who has the conviction of a good argument. On television you are left with little gems just hitting the speaker of your TV with a thud.

In the last election cycle the word was “gravitas”. Now I have known that word since I was a child and my father threw Latin at me all the time – don’t ask me why – but “gravitas” is a word that does not enjoy common usage. When you hear it over and over again it becomes annoyingly repetitive, and you start noticing who is parroting the new word. The new word this year is actually two words, but still in Latin. Saying “bona fides” is the way to preen your intellectual feathers this year, and it has the additional quality of pointing out who actually had a good education by how it is pronounced. I’ve heard a few mangled versions that made me wonder. Are these people not lawyers, or have they simply never been to mass? I am neither Catholic, nor an attorney, but I still get it – must be the musician’s ear. While I find all of this irritating, in a slightly humorous way, there is a phrase that has crept into everyone’s lexicon that has me seeing red. In both the blogosphere and in television coverage, not so much in print, people are quick to throw around the expression “drinking the Kool-Aid”.

At first I didn’t think much of it as people were just referring to the delusional qualities of Obama supporters. Since I am an Obama precinct captain I am well aware that we are not delusional – we just want the agreed upon, current primary/caucas system to decide who wins. From our perspective it is the Clintonites that are delusional. How can you even want a candidacy that is at the expense of everyone else? It is just un-American, or at least delusional. But as I heard this phrase over and over something started haunting me. What was haunting me was my own educational fingerprint, my own understanding of the real meaning of “drinking the Kool-Aid”.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and November, 1978 was the month that we were all left numb. As we experienced the shock of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone being assassinated in Moscone’s office by Supervisor Dan White, we were still ringing from the enormous shock of the Jonestown Massacre. These events happened within nine days of each other. Congressman Leo Ryan had led reporters and a delegation of concerned relatives to Guyana to investigate reports of mind control and imprisonment. The congressman and three others were murdered as they were about to fly home to report their findings. Subsequently, the people following the Rev. Jim Jones committed suicide. The majority of the members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana were from San Francisco. The community was reeling. This one horrific act of mass suicide involving between 913 and 1100 people was achieved by “drinking Kool-Aid” laced with cyanide.

Maybe I didn’t catch on to the level of cynicism in this phrase because of some long term PTSD over my own regional history. Maybe, for a while, I just forgot through my own participation in collective amnesia. But in repetition, I am remembering. As far as the press using this phrase – they have no excuse. While many covering this election may be younger, many are not. In either case we depend on the press to at least be able to look at their archives for the stories that inform our language. For the rest of us there needs to be more reflection. If you are old enough to remember Jonestown, please think twice before rattling off that phrase as merely a way of explaining something you find unfathomable. If you are not old enough to remember, the web is replete with information on this gruesome mass death and it is easy to research. All you have to do is Google “Jonestown”. As we fire-off opinions to each other on our wonderful blogosphere let us show more originality than the mainstream media we love to trash. Let us not repeat a phrase that has no business being used so casually, and has no business describing the informed support of historic candidates. Let’s not drink the Kool-Aid, and let’s not say we did.