My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/16/20 "Mangled and Dead"

"I’ll shoot you in the head/You’ll be mangled and dead/I’ll blow the smoke, walk away/Can’t you be my friend/Tell me you like me." Some of the paid protesters at the reopen America rallies organized by the administration have tested positive for COVID-19. Just one rally was posting numbers comparable to the Itaewon cluster. It's hard to feel anything toward them, sympathy or schadenfreude. They want the sympathy but will accept scorn: at least the latter gives them an enemy. And that's the strange duality of these protests. They're gathering and wailing, "our businesses, our housecleaning, our haircuts, pity us!" But since they arrive armed, there's the additional message "or we'll kill you." Now they're getting sick and the general reaction is a shrug and, "that'll happen." They won't get any sympathy for the very real suffering they and their families will go through, and they won't have anyone to call out for being mean about it. No one cares what happens to them. -5/16/20. "Mangled and Dead" from Newcastle Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)