The Circus Has Left Town

By Rick Horowitz

Call me crazy -- when I want to get to the Next Level, I take the escalator.

I'm trying, really I am, to work up the requisite emotional response to the news from Rancho Santa Fe. I should be teary-eyed. Grief-stricken. After all, it's not every week that 39 people decide to do themselves in en masse, and not only do themselves in, but explain it all on video and clean up after themselves. (Nice touch -- I'm sure the police were grateful.)

I should be terribly sad. Instead, I keep thinking about George Will, and the question George Will was asking the man on the Sunday-morning talk show: "Have you been marked on your chest by some of these Dolphin People from the planet Chulos?"

I think I wrote it down pretty much word for word, although I'm not sure about the spelling of Chulos, Chulos not being a planet I'd ever heard of before.

I had the feeling George Will hadn't heard of it before either, but here was this man, and he'd written a book claiming some sort of contact with alien beings, and since the Heaven's Gaters had "walked out the door" for their own rendezvous with beings residing elsewhere, the man was practically an expert; why not have him share his experiences with the rest of us?

Which is how George Will found himself asking about the Dolphin People and the planet Chulos -- a fairly un-George Will type of question, if you think about it. To which question, the man replied that it was a long story (a simple "Yes," "No," or "I also think I'm Napoleon" would have sufficed), and far too complicated to explain in the few minutes network TV had made available to him. Of course, we could buy his book....

And the most remarkable part of the whole exchange was that George Will asked this particular question without falling off his chair laughing so hard that water came out his nose. George didn't laugh, and neither did Sam and neither did Cokie, though it looked like a pretty close call more than once.

Those people were nuts.

Not George and Sam and Cokie -- the people in Heaven's Gate, the people who drank the poisoned potion. The founders were nuts. The folks who signed on and stayed in were nuts, too; at least they were by the time the end came. Would any normal person have believed that there was a "mothership" hiding behind a comet, ready to swoop them out of their Nikes and take them back where they came from? Would any normal person have packed a roll of coins for the trip? How about lip balm?

Rule for Living No. 387: The man who suggests castration may not have your best interests at heart.

I was especially intrigued, plowing through the material the Gaters left behind, by the tale of their beginnings -- how Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, a music teacher and a nurse, found each other, spent months camping together on the Rogue River (irony unintended, I'm sure) in Oregon, and "came to believe" that they were the Two Witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelations.

How nice for them. The rest of us mostly "come to believe" that we've left our car keys in our other pants; these two decide they're the Real Thing, heaven-sent and ready to recruit.

Rule for Living No. 519: People who call themselves Bo and Peep, even for a little while, should not be taken seriously.

Am I the slightest bit sad? I'm sad for the empty places all these people were so desperate to fill, and for the loved ones they left behind. But that was long ago, when they abandoned their husbands and wives, their parents and children, when they handed over their lives and their sense and their willpower.

I should feel worse. But they've been dead for years.

4/1/97

©1997 Rick Horowitz. All rights reserved.