In December of 1978, several months after I moved from England to Boston and four short weeks after news broke of the Jonestown massacre, I was traveling with a new beau through Northern California, falling in love not just with him, but with San Francisco and the lush wine country around it. It was there that the Peoples Temple, a pseudocommunity based on real need and run off the tracks by crazed demagogue Jim Jones, flowered in all its pathology before a newspaper exposé forced Jones ?to move the whole outfit to the Guyana jungle for the gruesome denouement in which 909 members died ?in an apparent mass suicide. I remember wondering how the confluence of natural beauty and physical ?and emotional violence that defined the catastrophe (and has also defined the best and worst in American cinema) could flourish in America, but not in the ?West European democracy in which I’d been raised. Sure, we’ve had our loony aspiring cultists, but unlike Jonestown, Waco and all the other scary dystopias currently nestling in them thar hills, they... More >>>