I, Shub-Niggurath, Have Come To Eulogize My Great Friend And Partner In Human Suffering, Henry Kissinger
I, Shub-Niggurath, Have Come To Eulogize My Great Friend And Partner In Human Suffering, Henry Kissinger
SIT AND APPRECIATE HIS GREATNESS, MORTALS.
Thank you. Thank you to Rabbi Goldberg for that jabbering introduction before his rational mind took leave of his body. It happens to mortals in my presence. Let’s give him a moment to stop his insensate yowling.
There.
Now, what can I, Shub Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, say about my dear friend and colleague Henry Kissinger?
This is a difficult day, for humans and for me personally. We have all lost a great man. I am grateful to the Kissinger family for allowing me the opportunity to say a few words.
Granted, they did not have a choice. Well, they did, they could have said “yes” when I asked the first time. Due to their resistance, which mainly manifested as inhuman screaming, I showed them visions of horrors so incomprehensible to the human imagination that they would have rendered even the hardiest soul a gibbering, incontinent husk.
The family sits catatonic before me now in the first row of the shul, in grief and also in brain-stunned torment, while the rest of you cower and moan. Fear not! I am only here to praise Henry, not to ingest your souls through one of my many slime-dripping, sharp-toothed mouths, after which you would be consumed for an eternity in one of my many stomachs, or spit back out as some sort of unholy, miasmatic creature, or rebirthed as one of the gof’nn hupadgh Shub Niggurath, my most favored worshipers.
No, today is about my brother in terror, Henry Alfred Kissinger, and a life well-lived.
I was so lucky to know Henry. Not just the Henry that so many of you knew. The Henry who planned the illegal bombing of Cambodia. The Henry who helped delay the Paris peace talks, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths and maimings and untold suffering, all to help Richard Nixon win an election. The Henry who liked to bro out with Augusto Pinochet, or share a few drinks with Nixon while the president griped about the Jews.
Henry and Nixon loved to challenge each other to see which one knew more racist insults, and boy, even I, Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, had never heard half of them! I like to picture Nixon and Henry now, reunited in eternal darkness, minds pain-seared by the torments long planned for them by the Elders, still trying to see which one knew more racist names for Pakistanis.
Oh, the laughs they are having as the flesh is peeled from their bones!
I speak of the private Henry. The one his friends knew. The playboy swinger who bedded Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, and the star of a Danish porno. True story! Google it!
I recall one particular occasion in the ‘70s, supping with Henry at Elaine’s, when a particularly well-known actress—I won’t say her name to avoid embarrassing her—okay, it was Jacqueline Bisset —but this famous actress was dining at the table next to ours, and she started chatting up Henry. The young lady had had a Harvey Wallbanger or six, and before I knew it, she had plunked herself down on Henry’s lap and begun whispering in his ear.
Now, Henry had that Bavarian poker face, you know, the one that gave away absolutely nothing. But whatever Ms. Bisset said made even Henry raise his eyebrows. Then he pulled back, looked her right in the eye, and said in that heavy accent of his, “My dear, perhaps only Nixon could go to China, but only Kissinger can do that with a riding crop and a Cambodian orphan. Shall we?”
Next thing I knew, he’d whisked her out of the restaurant and stuck me with the bill! Didn’t even finish his beef stroganoff!
But Henry was a gentleman. To the end of his days, he never told me what Ms. Bisset had proposed, nor what happened to that Cambodian orphan afterwards. You’d think that being the mate of a powerful god named Hastur the Unspeakable whose very appearance can drive men into permanent madness would hold some sway, but I respected our friendship too much.
People do not know how playful Henry could be. How he would offer to help old women cross the street, then push them in front of a speeding bus and skip away, cackling. How he built his own gingerbread house on his Connecticut estate that he could lure children into, with its cute little frosting-trimmed windows and the kitchen full of herbs he had personally collected from the Dreamlands to season them with. Did he do this out of cruelty?
No! Absolutely not! Henry loved children. Especially if they were a little fatty.
He always had a smile and a piece of candy or a lava pit full of damned souls to gift to my own children, the Twin Obscenities Zhar and Lloigor, before they angered the Elder Gods and were imprisoned for millennia in the cavern beneath the Lake of Dread. But still, every time I saw him in later years, he asked about them and ordered me to give them his best.
They still speak of his kindness, in a language beyond language. I daresay he is one reason they have survived their eternal imprisonment
Silence, worms! Your infernal whimpering annoys Shub-Niggurath! The shiva meal won’t start without all of you anyway.
Ah, Henry. He was so much more than a statesman and conduit of pure evil and friend. He was a husband. He was a generous father and grandfather. He loved dogs, even when they did nothing but howl in his presence.
The world has lost a great man. I am only sorry that he passed on before the Outer Gods could usher in the Age of Agonies, our prophesied millennia-long reign during which all of humanity will be enslaved to Thog the Ancient in the underground city of Xuthal and slowly driven mad in its dark corridors from which there is no escape.
Henry would have loved to see that. I promise his memory that I will think of him every day during the thousand years of suffering and terror from which there is no escape that will soon befall all of you.
Thank you. I now turn the pulpit back over to the rabbi to lead us all in the Kaddish.
This is my favourite post of the year. Thank you.
You had me at "Shub Niggurath."