'Drinking the Kool-Aid'

Hollywood drank the Kool-Aid big-time on The Artist. The Weinstein-backed silent, black-and-white film swept the Best Actor, Director and Film Oscars, and a day later, Academy members must have been reeling around, holding their brainpans and going: “What were we thinking?”

Welcome to our second installment of curious idioms. After examining “Jump the Shark” (about a month ago), today we turn our attention to “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” a phrase that comes up a lot in politics, religion, and middlebrow culture.

In the recent George Clooney movie The Ides of March, Marisa Tomei plays a reporter trying to squeeze a candid quote (tsismis, basically) out of hotshot political manager Ryan Gosling. He won’t bite though, because he truly “believes” in his candidate. Tomei gives him an appraising look: “Wow, you really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you?”

Those who supported Barack Obama with an almost messianic gleam in their eye when he first ran for US president were also said to have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” (One wonders what they’re drinking now.) Those who bought into George W. Bush’s madcap search for WMDs in Iraq are said, in hindsight, to have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” It’s often a disparaging phrase, synonymous with doing something wreckless, unthinking, blindly faithful.

Uncool aid: Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid) was the beverage of choice at Jonestown.

It’s also used in less sinister contexts — say, in connection with Steve Jobs and his charismatic yearly product “reveals” in the past. Apple fan boys, in particular — the ones who would sell their grandmas for MacWorld tickets or camp out for weeks to score the new iPhone — are often said to have “drunk the Apple Kool-Aid.”

Hmm. One wonders how all of this sounds to the makers of the powdery sugar drink that came to be popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

I personally enjoyed Kool-Aid back in the day. I especially liked the goofy commercials that were flashed on TV screens in between Saturday morning cartoons: a guy in an oversized Kool-Aid costume smashing through walls in slo-mo and offering pitchers of not-quite-juice to wide-eyed kids. No wonder we were brainwashed.

The origin of the phrase seems twofold. About half of the netizens out there attribute it to the 909 poor souls who drank cyanide-laced punch in Jonestown, Guyana under the “spiritual” guidance of Reverend Jim Jones back in 1978. Jones, strangely, was not always a crazy cult leader. He was actually embraced by prominent politicians such as San Francisco Mayor Harvey Milk and First Lady Rosalyn Carter as a progressive, integrationist civic leader. But that was before Jonestown.

After several practice runs using a placebo to “test their faith” (it wasn’t Kool-Aid, interestingly, but a low-cost alternative called Flavor Aid), Jones one day asked his followers — including some 200 children — to lie down on mats and knock back little Dixie Cups full of a cyanide-laced version. The result: 909 dead bodies, an immediate, nationwide suspicion of religious cults that continues to this day… and one snarky phrase in the making.

But the “Kool-Aid” etymology goes back even further. Back to Ken Kesey, who gathered a flock of fellow LSD enthusiasts in the mid-‘60s to embark on a bus tour of America, filming their encounters with “straight” society. They would occasionally hold parties featuring light shows and music by, among others, the Grateful Dead. Calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, their goal was to shake up “uptight” society, to rattle staid beliefs… and to dose as many unsuspecting people as possible with LSD-laced punch. Toward this end, they would display two large vats of Kool-Aid at their “Acid Test” parties. One was regular Kool-Aid, the other was spiked with acid. The vats often weren’t labeled. As Tom Wolfe describes it in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

Cuckoo’s nest: Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster bus, circa 1967.

Then a large trash can, plastic, was carried to the middle of the room, and all were invited to help themselves to the Kool-Aid it contained… Actually there were two cans. Hugh Romney took the microphone and said, “This one over here is for the little folk and this one over here is for the big folk. This one over here is for the kittens and this one over here is for the tigers,” and so forth and so on. As far as he was concerned, he was doing everything but putting a sign on the loaded batch saying LSD.

So the element of danger in drinking the Kool-Aid was always present, even back in the Kesey days.

Giving in to belief is an attractive proposition. There is nothing so precious, Filipinos will probably agree, as people’s sense of hope. But we live in more cynical times now. We tend to raise an eyebrow when someone’s zeal gets a little carried away. We tend to look at the fine print. 

As we can see, both origins of “drinking the Kool-Aid” suggest someone who has lost all touch with reality, who is blinded by faith or belief. These are people who tend to stare at you with a creepy air of conviction, the way Scientologists look as though they’re examining your skull shape when talking to you on the street. Either that, or they have a weird, goopy gleam in their eye, like they’ve just seen a “double rainbow.” Either way, it’s a reference that raises the antennae of most ordinary folk who dwell on Planet Earth. At the least, it alerts the skeptical to move a few cautious steps away from the Kool-Aid imbiber.