Ding! Dong! The Kissinger Is Dead Post

"When the wicked perish, there is song." It's in the Bible!

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I’ve been dreading Henry Kissinger’s death for years. Not because I’m gonna miss the guy, of course, obviously. The complete opposite. It felt a little dark to get all “ding dong, the witch is dead” when the news broke. I didn’t really want to celebrate someone’s death, but then you look at Kissinger’s body count and you can’t really fault Bourdain for wanting to strangle the guy. Where does that leave us?

It leaves us smack dab in the middle of the Bible, as it turns out. “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish, there is song,” says Proverbs 11:10. I like how mathematical this framing is. It’s not necessarily telling people to sing and dance when bad people die, but it’s not denying that there’s some very straightforward cause and effect here. 

This isn’t going to be another Kissinger obit, since there’ve been plenty of solid ones. The best I read was Spencer Ackerman’s for Rolling Stone, which both holds Kissinger responsible for the death of millions and excoriates America’s ruling class for its continued deference to his legacy with righteous fury. Instead, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the deaths of very bad people — the sort of generational villains who killed on Kissinger’s scale.