Abby, a 25-year-old in Brooklyn who runs the Instagram meme page @be.the.reversecowgirl, was on a first date when a push notification rocked her world. Henry Kissinger—former secretary of state and national security adviser, singular architect of the U.S. security state, underwriter of many crimes against humanity, and a frequent, irritating presence within D.C. high society—was dead at the age of 100. Abby, who asked me to refrain from using her last name in this story, was born in 1998, and is therefore generations removed from the meridian of Kissinger’s power, his carpet-bombing of Cambodia, or his brutal subversion of Chilean democracy. And yet, despite being contemporaries with other, far more emergent American anathemas (Bush, Cheney, Trump, Rumsfeld, hell, even Reagan), Abby immediately suspended her date. The death of Kissinger was a once-in-a-lifetime shitposting event.
“It’s something I’ve eagerly awaited for several years,” she told me over email. “I yelled the news to the whole bar. I had to tell my date to give me a minute so I could fire off some tweets. I was like, ‘I’m sorry if this is weird, but I’ve been waiting for this for a while.’ ”
You can see the fruits of Abby’s labor on her meme page. On Thursday, she uploaded a Photoshop of a younger (read: in his mid-50s) Kissinger paneled against a roaring backdrop of fire and brimstone. Two bootleg comic-strip Calvins—the type you see plastered on the bumpers of Toyota Siennas—are urinating on his head. “REST IN PISS,” reads the caption. “1923 — Too Damn Long.” A few slides later, Abby excerpted a quote from the Washington Post’s obituary for the statesman, in which Kissinger defines his foreign policy philosophy as “choosing” between “different forms of evil,” which is both an outdated worldview and tiresome, Bond-villain thug talk. “He’s such a prominent evil for me,” said Abby. “Even though many of his major foreign policy decisions were decades ago, you can still see the effects of those choices today.”
Abby is not alone in her disrespect. Henry Kissinger has been a canonically sinister figure for decades, despised, with zest, by flower-child boomers, discontented Gen Xers, progressive wonks, anti-imperial activists, and so on. Anyone who knows their history and possesses a dim view on the United States’ centurylong project of paramount global influence can wield Kissinger as an easily absorbable distillation of those complex ideas. Few politicians—especially those of the unelected deep-state variety—have been more effectively transformed into a cudgel, which alone kept Kissinger famous long after his statecraft career ended in 1977.
This has also made his reign remarkably fertile territory for memes. “Kissinger’s firm refusal to die represents something bigger to people, like that there are evil forces bigger than you that you don’t have power over,” said Alex Turvy, a Ph.D. student who studies memes at Tulane University, when interviewed by the Washington Post about why the hatred of Kissinger has remained so steadfast, for so long. “The memes are a way of releasing some of that pent-up energy.”
Still, it’s interesting that young people, who are more materially disconnected from Kissinger’s crimes than any American generation before, have managed to keep their distaste for the former secretary razor sharp. Yes, it’s true that while only the more erudite Zoomers have a firm grasp on Kissinger’s atrocities, those who do have selected the language of heretical, zeitgeist-y, and often profane memes to express their animus for the former secretary. (Compare that with the average Kissinger-hating boomer, who is far more likely to antagonize Kissinger by, say, sharing a Washington Post article about him in a chain email.) As a result, Abby, and those aligned with her, has successfully transformed his death into a watershed social media phenomenon. She goes as far as to say that by catalyzing the algorithm with her vivid contempt for Kissinger, other less-informed Zoomers might be inclined to do some research of their own.
“I did have one person comment on the meme I made about Kissinger asking what it was he did, so I think there are a lot of people out there like them—they just might not be as comfortable admitting they don’t know as much,” said Abby. “His death is a great opportunity to educate those who see the memes but don’t entirely understand them.”
You saw the same dynamic play out throughout Wednesday’s rapturous night of posting. One of the top trends on Twitter—right as Abby put her date on pause to savor the jubilation—read, simply, “RIP BOZO.” Another Twitter account, called @DidKissingerD1e, has kept tabs on the statesman’s elongated life span since 2021. It checked in every couple of days with dour updates on his continued survival, all of its 38,000 followers horny for catharsis on the horizon. So when Kissinger did finally pass, the account’s overjoyed announcement of his death (which read simply, “YES”) collected 449,000 likes and thousands more elated quote-tweets.
Across the airwaves, you can find @the_political_compass, another Instagram meme account run by a 26-year-old from Toronto named Lyra. She sanctified the demise of Kissinger by posting an imagined version of the wildly popular Spotify Wrapped recap, which tabulates the listening habits of the platform’s users. Instead of “Your Top Songs,” the post read “Your Top Deaths.” No. 1 is Henry Kissinger; No. 5 was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
“I didn’t really know who Kissinger was until maybe 10th or 11th grade in world history when we briefly went over the Vietnam War,” Lyra, who also requested I keep her last name private, told me. “In university I took a course on the Cold War and he was discussed a bit more, but even then it was only about [his achievements.] … It only takes a few Wikipedia shallow-dives to learn about all the atrocities.
“He was literally ancient but still topical,” continued Lyra. “Every few months you’d see a headline in the news of someone meeting with him, or there being an anniversary of some event that involved him, and people’s disdain for him would reignite.”
Abby essentially feels the same way. Kissinger, she said, is the sort of war criminal that is perfectly tuned for the highly online twentysomething. “He made his moves in silence,” she explained, referring to the secretary’s covert base of power—embedded within the darkened corridors of the Nixon and Ford Cabinets, orchestrating extrajudicial raids and wars that eschewed the limits of the liberal checks and balances, forever transforming the way average Americans regard the arbitration of the intelligence community. Information about his crimes have slowly dribbled out, piecemeal, through a wealth of salacious documentaries, FOIA-backed investigations, and declassified documents that have all provided a better picture of the West’s reign of terror during the Cold War. From the right vantage point, then, Kissinger appears to be the man who provided the blueprint for America’s continued derangement. This makes him Abby’s public enemy No. 1.
“The internet has been integral in raising younger generations’ awareness about the atrocities Kissinger facilitated,” finished Abby. “People my age know how to take advantage of that.”
Both Abby and Lyra have become veterans of the confused zeitgeist that follows the death of an enormously resonant figure. Neither of them prepared a set of Kissinger memes in anticipation of the moment, in the way that the New York Times keeps a back catalog of postmortems in editorial storage, but Lyra did say she has something of a “protocol” for big news: a set of lowest-common-denominator meme templates that can be easily applied to any circumstance, be it the passing of Queen Elizabeth, or the destruction of the Titanic submersible. It’s all proudly sardonic and nihilistically Logged On—the mock-ups of Kissinger burning in hell are intended to offend—but surprisingly, Lyra said she occasionally feels a few pangs of remorse about dancing on someone’s grave.
“He’s still a man with a family who’s sad to see him go, and that has to be respected too,” she said. “We can meme and criticize all we want, but it’s best to focus on the ideas rather than the man.”
Her restraint has become remarkably outmoded within the digital culture she inhabits. The Zoomers may be literate and well-versed, but that does not mean they’re reverent. Don Caldwell, editor in chief at Know Your Meme—the foremost authority on internet trends—noted that we’re in the midst of a pattern where the deaths of controversial people are being treated with euphoric ignobility by the ascendent generation. Rush Limbaugh, argued Caldwell, represented one of the first cracks in the façade. Here was this conservative firebrand, slipping out of the mortal plane after a protracted battle with cancer in early 2021, only to be met with a ravenous appetite for debasement among young people—young people who, by and large, came of age long after Limbaugh was past his prime.
“Making fun of someone’s death has become an easy way to get a lot of likes and reposts on TikTok and Instagram,” Caldwell said. “It’s become a way for people to bond. People have celebrated the death of their enemies since the beginning of humanity, but I do think social media has allowed folks to do that at a scale we haven’t seen before. Kissinger isn’t interpreted as someone you have a difference of opinion with. He’s someone who is either directly or indirectly responsible for large numbers of people losing their lives. In a case like that, reverence goes out the window.”
In that sense, Kissinger is just the latest victim of a more glacial sense of American decline. Conditions are deteriorating. People are angry. A second Trump presidency, which would surely be far more disastrous than the first, seems increasingly likely. It is so difficult to exact revenge in the land of the living, so we’ve turned to the next best option. In 2023, nobody—not even the queen—is guaranteed a gracious death.
