My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/16/20 "One Minute"

"That’s right, settle back in your chair/Listen to the music/Close your eyes and watch the pretty colors dancing around in your hair/Follow the music." There are protests now in the US against the stay-at-home orders and public shutdowns of businesses. Unsurprisingly, they're also ad hoc rallies for the administration. But what a strange thing to protest: here's how you don't catch the disease--how very dare you prevent us from dying. It goes back to the early days when the market crashed and apparatchiks were floating "die for the economy." Pushback against preventative responses have echoed post-9/11 rhetoric: we won't surrender to fear. Diseases don't care about your feelings. The outrage in the protests speaks to something else, though: the paucity of opportunities for public participation. These people are on the verge of tears because they can't shop, but what other activity is available to them, what other way of defining themselves hasn't been absorbed by neoliberalism? -4/16/20. "One Minute" from Blue Corpse (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)