Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Jonestown: Not so remote after all

The complete five-part Jonestown series:
Jim Jones: The Fake early years
Jonestown: Introduction
Jonestown: More Questions than answers
Jonestown: Not so remote after all
Jonestown: The end

When I was researching the Waco “massacre,” a light went on – that the buildings were empty, and that the whole thing was just a TV show. I laughed out loud with that realization. With Columbine, the little light told me that the SWAT unit that was mobilized was there to keep people out of the school, and not to interfere with anything inside. It was a made-for-TV-news event.

A light has gone on about Jonestown, but it is faint. Please follow along.

Continue reading “Jonestown: Not so remote after all” →

How Mom saved me

I know I have to write about Jonestown, and I will. But my mind has been occupied lately, the class reunion playing a part. I was thinking back on an episode I call “How mom saved my life.”

It was 1960. I was the youngest of four boys, ten years old. I am the only survivor. At that age I did not have a large enough world to know things were wrong. We were a strong Catholic family, and I attended a Catholic school. That’s important to know. We were sitting at the dinner table, and Mom got up and announced “I am not going to mass again until your Dad quits drinking.”

I looked over at Dad at the end of the table, and for the first time in my life realized he was drunk. What Mom was doing was blackmail, of course, and in the subsequent years I would think of it as melodrama. She was telling Dad that he was responsible for her eternal soul, laying the burden on him.

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A reunion

Too much time on the highway and in motels results in stuff like this. We are back now – I didn’t want to say anything, but might as well spit it out – I attended my fiftieth high school class reunion. I graduated from Billings Central Catholic High School in 1968. Good lord am I old!

A few reflections:

  • I look pretty good. Most of my classmates have put on pounds and have not stayed in shape. I guess we just reach a point where we give up, but I have not yet gotten there. I still have dark hair, have controlled my weight, and work out often.
  • We were a class of 115. Thirteen have died.
  • My class rank was 87, and I like to joke that for that reason I thought our class size must have been … 87. I was not a good student, and did not light up until later, in college. I was told by teachers that I lacked direction, and that my standardized tests were in the high percentiles, so that I was underachieving.

Continue reading “A reunion” →

Jonestown: More questions than answers

The complete five-part Jonestown series:
Jim Jones: The Fake early years
Jonestown: Introduction
Jonestown: More Questions than answers
Jonestown: Not so remote after all
Jonestown: The end

We are off on another trip, and so any work I am doing on Jonestown is on hold. However, I did take time this morning to look into Gaia’s work on this subject, which is still visible at Fakeopedia, here. After reading that I realized that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but merely pick up on, highlight, and perhaps expand on work already done.

In reading that work I realized as well that this is a massive undertaking. I have more questions than answers, but am settling on one aspect that makes everything else more poignant:

No one died.

Stop and think about it – the people who supposedly died there were from the lower casts of society, at least that is the story. They were mostly black, and that adds to the unspoken and indelicate attitude that these were not important people, sorry to say. So there are several angles from which we might approach the event:

Continue reading “Jonestown: More questions than answers” →

Jim Jones: The fake early years

Jonestown

Note: My only source at this point is the primary source of all lies and false history,  Wikipedia. My thinking is jaded by presupposition – after reading Wiki about Jones and Jonestown, all I could think was “fake, fake, fake.” Therefore be advised that my writing will be riddled with confirmation bias.

The gruesome image above is an aerial photo of Jonestown in the aftermath of mass suicide by cyanide, the origin of the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” and what was in “fact” we are told Flavor-Aid. We are told that Jim Jones and 918 of his followers died that day. I printed the above photo and used a Sharpie to black out each body as I counted. I came up with about 200, tops.

Continue reading “Jim Jones: The fake early years” →

Standing in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist …

I am prepared now to go forward with the Jim Jones series, starting with his early life. That will come tomorrow or the day after. What has happened so far is good, lots of input which I have not and will not read until my own work, such as it is, is done.

This is, however, a diversion. While in Europe I ran out of reading material, and when we got home found nothing of interest. But while in college I was introduced to two volumes, The American Intellectual Tradition, edited by David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper. They have sat on my bookshelf for years.

My intent was to go back and reread a selection from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class wherein he introduces for the first time the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” When in college (and I told the professor this) the man’s words simply did not penetrate my thick cranium*. I kept losing focus. The professor, a wise man, simply smiled and said don’t worry. My intent yesterday was to read it again to see if the cranium had lost some of its bone mass.

But I stumbled and never got there, instead reading a portion of William James’ The Will to Believe. I am a great admirer of this man and his pristine and probing intellect, first having read about him in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and then reading his (very accessible) series of lectures that came to be known as The Varieties of Religious Experience (available as a free download at Gutenberg).

Continue reading “Standing in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist …” →

Jonestown, introduction

The complete five-part Jonestown series:
Jim Jones: The Fake early years
Jonestown: Introduction
Jonestown: More Questions than answers
Jonestown: Not so remote after all
Jonestown: The end

I have long wanted to explore Jonestown and all of the suicide deaths by cyanide poisoning, but have been put off by the massive undertaking, the complexity and surprises that await.  I have two prior projects behind me:

With John Denver’s fake death I was a rookie, and so spent tons of hours in the summer and fall of 2016 putting together all of the data. I was unsure of myself and wanted to nail it. Did I? I am not the jury, but for myself concluded, both with my own writing and research and excellent help in the comments, that the death was fake and (say with  60% possibility) that Denver, whose real name is unknown, decided to live out his life in New Zealand near his adopted daughter. When I presented it, it was a completed package, 7500 words, and comments that followed were intriguing. Not mentioned there, I suspect he and Annie are still a couple.

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A recycled vicsim?

A Facebook friend put up the following post:

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First, the photos all look stylized, as if she is modeling differing types of makeup. They have an unnatural quality, too professional to be selfies, and yet … not good enough to really be professional.

Second, the glasses, the eyebrows, the shape of the face … I spent quite a bit of time comparing faces after the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, and while it was not well-received, I convinced myself that the same people with reverse angles and a bit of makeup and a wig or two were used as different victims. “Alex Beltran” resembled a couple of people in the montage below: Continue reading “A recycled vicsim?” →

Note from the Hinterland

We have been traveling and I make it a point not to use the blog as a travelogue. Sometimes in our trips I run across pertinent matters … in Paris a couple of years ago I realized that photos of American troops entering that city on Champs Elysees in 1944 were paste-ups, mere war propaganda. No such triumphic march took place. In Copenhagen I realized a shooting in the hippie district of that city was fake, and witnessed a giant and pointless show of police power. I suspected it was a real estate-minded affair, as that part of the city, Freetown Christiana, can probably support high rises and expensive restaurants.  And then there was our trip to Buenos Aires and stumbling on to the grave of Eva Peron, realizing her death was fake, and later learning that she went on to offer her birth canal to the mediocre talent Madonna.

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Irony

I write here about a personal event, but also one that happened 31 years ago, so time has healed most of the wound. The event was as follows: A man broke into our house and raped our eight-year-old daughter on March 20, 1987. I was asleep in the basement, my then-wife asleep on the couch after having watched March Madness (she followed Notre Dame).

Police were unable to solve the crime, and because of its gruesome nature, had to provide the public with a perpetrator. They settled on a young man, Jimmy Ray Bromgard, and lacking any evidence, forged hair samples and provided an “expert”witness who said those hairs were Jim’s. The kid spent fifteen years in prison. In 2002 the Innocence Project set him free, and because the State of Montana was fraudulent in its case against him, he received a $3.5 million settlement. I imagine he got some of that. I hope he did.

In 2015 the real perpetrator was uncovered, Ronald Dwight Tipton, whose family name appears in the 1988 Billings, Montana phone book as living one block from our home. Why did he choose our daughter? That’s a family matter. I understand it now, though I did not before this year. However, Tipton will walk free now, as the statute has run.

I understand irony. It is a thing quite apart from humor. It cuts deep. Our “justice” system first imprisoned an innocent man. No one cared that Jim Bromgard was innocent. They “solved” the crime. The system worked. The lead detective on the crime landed a nice FBI position!

They have now let the guilty man go free. It cuts no deeper than that.