Nothing like waking up to dozens of texts asking for intel about Henry Kissinger’s rumored connection to a spooky tech company with a penchant for raising craven politicians from the dead to jump-start me out of a month of neglecting my newsletter.
One text, though, stood out: a rough mock-up of a political cartoon by my fellow-former HazMedia colleague, Jamal McWhorter, who’s now at the Spammer Quarterly. The final product ran today over on their blog, and they’ve been kind enough to let me reprint it here:
The former U.S Secretary of State, of course, died last night at his home in Connecticut at the age of 100. At Discourse Blog, Jack Mirkinson has a dismaying rundown of the many fawning Kissinger obits running in the mainstream press today, while Rolling Stone published a fair assessment of Kissinger’s legacy as a war criminal beloved by, as the headline put it “America’s ruling class.”
The Very Online contingent has long been waiting with gleeful thirst to celebrate what was, pre-revival technology, understood to be Kissinger’s inevitable demise. That anticipation only grew with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with many folks hanging on to their handles on the site so as not to miss the festivities. But when President Rudy Ruiz made his seemingly miraculous public reappearance at the GOP debate back in August, speculation began almost immediately that, if anyone else was a likely RevTech client, Kissinger had to be at or near the top of the list. Amid the plentiful Grim Reaper-at-the-claw-machine memes are plenty of finger-waggers warning us that we very likely have not seen the end of Kissinger.
I’m inclined to agree with the finger-waggers. RevTech CEO Carron Nielsberg doesn’t tweet much, but he banged out a winky emoji last night just after the Kissinger news broke:
It’s perfectly possible that Nielsberg is just screwing with us, but the one thing Kissinger has (had?) in common with 100% of known RevTech clients (n=1) is a powerful legacy in Republican politics.
But I’m less interested in trying to read the tea leaves about Kissinger’s relationship to RevTech than I am in thinking about the public’s new and developing relationship to death because of RevTech, and in light of Kissinger’s passing. After Ruiz’s reappearance in August, there was such an uptick in risky behavior from the public that RevTech actually issued a call for caution, and who can forget the dueling #BringHerBack/#LetHerRest hashtags that followed Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s death?
The looming spectre of the monied and powerful having access to revival technology complicates the performance of public remembrance — or, in Kissinger’s case, the public’s ability and willingness to speak ill of the perhaps-not-dead. To wit: a particularly vicious (and accurate) quote from the deceased chef and critic Anthony Bourdain concerning the genocide that Kissinger facilitated in Cambodia went viral within hours of the Kissinger news breaking:
It strikes me that, amid rumors that we may see the possible resurrection of Henry Kissinger, we are very much seeing the actual resurrection of the spirit, if not the person, of Anthony Bourdain. For me, this throws into relief the inevitable tragedy of revival technology’s potential: the aforementioned monied and powerful — the Rudy Ruizes and Henry Kissingers of the world — are vastly more able to avail themselves of such medical advancements. According to one biographer, Kissinger bears responsibility for the deaths of some three million people worldwide. None of them are likely to have, or to have ever had, a direct line to a billionaire med-tech magnate with the powers of resurrection.
And so for as much as the human conception of the finality of death has changed with the advent of RevTech, we’re likely to stay stuck in a pre-Ruiz cultural loop when it comes to the kind of everlasting life that celebrity — or notoriety — offers. We’ll mourn the nobodies who were everything to us — our friends, our families, our loved ones — and, at least for now, remain unable to say a final, much-earned goodbye-forever-and-fuck-off to those who’ve most earned it.
What Else I’m Reading Right Now:
- “Ireland has ‘lost one of its most beloved icons’: Tributes paid to Shane MacGowan” (Irish Times)
- “Texas sues Pfizer for overstating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness” (Dallas Morning News)
- “Judge denies Texas’ request to stop feds from cutting border razor wire” (Texas Tribune)
- “‘Witch Bottle’ Found Along Gulf Coast In Texas” (Weather Channel)
- “Mystery disease that’s killing dogs is likely caused by a virus, Texas researchers say” (KVUE)
Minne Moves Home 