My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/19/20 "Lithe Body"

"How could I send you all that I made/When I didn’t make it, it made me/And now I have something to contend with/A process enabled/The mission of a moving character." I watched the Cold War thriller Fail Safe today. I'm returning to the Cold War a lot lately, from watching Stranger Things with my students last year, to prepping research for a story about the Satanic Panic, to reflecting on the parallels between our present pandemic moment of deprivation and the threat of Soviet dystopia coupled with letting AIDS brutalize the triple "H" populations: Haitians, homos, and heroin addicts. The film is interesting for being disavowed by the Department of Defense, but it feels like propaganda now. The central message is that the political leadership is composed of competent figures wrestling with the moral consequences of their actions. History, through Stanislav Petrov, shows that we were instead saved by workers who ignored idiot orders. -5/19/20. "Lithe Body" from Austin Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)