Horstine the Whale: An Obituary

Look at you, you fucking dumbass.

Dead and bloated like a balloon off the coast of some Danish island. You made me care about you, I’ll never forgive it.

I’m not even sure you’re one and the same whale. They said in March when you first turned up off the Baltic coast that you were a young male, a boy. Then you were an adult if small male humpback as you continued to beach yourself. Now they say you’re a female whale, and I harbour dark suspicions that there may have been more than one of you and that the others just swam away. Late in the game the German press melded all of you with your last doomed self into a singular personality, into a Timmy the Disney Whale, a stupid media drama for a generally confused, rudderless and deeply naive public drunk on nature cartoons.

Livestreams of your beached ass off the Meck-Pomm coast racked up countless viewers. At some points ten percent of everyone in Germany was watching you try to die with quiet dignity in the shallow waters of Wismar Bay. Eight million people tuned in from the office to see you snort and scuffle while live Bundestag streams where laws are made and our fate is decided are lucky to get eight thousand eyeballs.

I called you a retard and named you Horst, which is a German name for idiots. You were a Vollhorst who couldn’t find his way back into the Atlantic where you belonged; I couldn’t deal with your excruciating fate and the failure of authorities to just leave you alone otherwise. Now that you’ve been properly gendered you must be neither Timmy nor Horst, but Horstine.

The People In Charge had the right idea at first. They wanted to leave you to your dignified death. Then something changed. I suspect the PIC began to think about what your corpse would do to the tourism industry and to ponder the predicament they would find themselves in if tasked to remove twelve metric tonnes of rotting whale flesh from the Wismar coast. We are talking about hapless bureaucrats who cannot even replace simple bridges or repair basic infrastructure without endless consultations and committees and budgetary debates lasting months and years.

Philanthromorons several orders of magnitude stupider than you swept in to fund a renewed rescue effort, and the PIC decided to greenlight this arrant idiocy. Tabloid reporters at BILD secured exclusive rights to film the circus. Better to tow your sorry ass into the Atlantic and let you die out of sight; better to let imbecile Germans think you had been shipped off to uncle’s farm to swim in eternal peace alongside that beloved Bernese who bit the postman when you were seven than to confront the harsh realities of nature and also of our own mortality. The Whale Whisperers, the Experts, descended on you. They told us everything would be okay, because the myth of nature is that it is proximity to human civilisation which is debilitating for wild creatures, and that a withdrawal from our milieu is in itself healing and all you need to survive. I know better, I understood from the beginning that you would die; it was only a question of where and when.

In truth, you insisted on the shallows because you were too weak to swim in deep waters. You knew you would drown in them. They enticed you into a semi-flooded barge and you swam into it thinking that here might be another sandy place to rest. Maybe the infernal landapes would stop harassing you there. Because you were such a loveable dumbass you got it wrong of course, it was just a corpse removal operation avant la lettre. They tied you down with cables and towed you around the Jutland peninsula; when the seas got rough and you were battered against the sides of your sad bathtub, they tried to dump you out. You refused to swim away, clinging to your barge for dear life. Eventually the sailors dragged you to your death, and the wounds from the cables are still visible on your corpse.

They affixed a GPS tracking device to your body, but refused to publicise the data because obviously there was no data. You sunk almost immediately to the bottom, you drowned. In the end, however, you put the knife into all of their fantasies. You took revenge on your tormenters in a last poetic act. You managed not to decompose in obscurity but to wash up dead, your body betraying your mistreatment. Now your bloated corpse threatens at any moment to explode. They have tried to remove you, but the waves push you ever closer to shore: an indictment of human folly and human idiocy.

I’m so sorry we did this to you. I’m so sorry that the Federal Republic, a land awash in bureaucratically undeportable migrant criminals and scammers, decided to pour millions into deporting your innocent whaleness out of all the creatures we might’ve tried to kick out otherwise. Incontinent empathy can be its own kind of cruelty, but at least now you are beyond all pain and suffering.

What a farce this has been.