My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/1/20 "Painstakingly Critical"

"I’m painstakingly critical/Not just of the world outside/I criticize myself/And do damage unto me." Since leaving the US I've worried that I turned my back on my family and friends, abandoned them to their fate. I'd been an activist, a journalist, a teacher, and a union organizer, but when fascism dropped the mask and Nazis openly marched in the streets, I left. I've been worrying about how the eugenic ideology of the administration would play out with COVID and then I woke up Sunday to pictures of Philadelphia on fire. Every time I open social media I see new videos of police driving into crowds in ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks. I had to explain to my colleagues what was happening, and I don't have the words. How do you translate "police state"? How do I tell them the administration grew up envying Soviet-style oppression? I don't have the words in my own language. -6/1/20. "Painstakingly Critical" from What Was Out There Disappeared (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)