I’ll just repeat here what I put over on 22 about Herman Cain:
It’s fistpumping for the rare occasion that someone powerful faces appropriate consequences for their actions. Herman Cain participated in the system to convince people the virus was a hoax, that masks were unnecessary, and that people should get back to making rich people richer rather than worrying about their own health. Most of the consequence of this system has been borne by poor POC who work on the front lines, who don’t have access to adequate testing or health care, who are too poor to afford the luxury of choosing not to work, and who aren’t lucky enough to be able to work from home. Herman Cain can work remotely as he will, or not work at all, has excellent health care, and has excellent access to testing, all while he’s undermining all of those things for people most vulnerable to the disease. Dying in a car wreck might be a balanced end for the needless deaths he’s helped increase, but it’s not a fitting one the way that dying to the disease he publicly denied and encouraged other people to deny is.
Consequences like that are usually the realm of fairy tales, that tell us that evil people get their due, and we can all live happily ever after. Real life is not a fairy tale. Villains are more likely to face a windfall of wealth than an actual comeuppance. Trump and his administration can exacerbate the pandemic for their own self-interest from their fortress safely and with only minimal risk to them and theirs but at great cost to the rest of society.
Censoring people who find a little katharsis that the hubris of a powerful villain has led to his own katastrophe only serves to whitewash his villainy. Should not his role in denying the virus and the irony in dying to it serve as a warning to all who would do likewise? What is in bad taste is leading naive and/or desperate people to unnecessary deaths, not talking bad about someone who both did so and met a fitting end.
Like, are we supposed to go around saying “Well, actually, Luke Skywalker slaughtered millions of workers aboard that Death Star, most of whom had nothing to do with its weapons systems” ? Are we supposed to regard Thanos getting snapped out of existence as some tragedy rather than his rightful comuppance for doing the same to half of the universe? Are Hansel and Gretel the real villains for shoving the witch into the oven in which she would have cooked them? I don’t know about you, but I think hell no. Cheering for villains meeting a fitting end is as old as human storytelling, and it’s so rare that we actually get to see that happen. Like, sure, Hitler lost, but if there were any justice in the world, he’d have been starved for a while, gassed naked followed by his cooked corpse being thrown in an unmarked hole. This isn’t merely cheering on the death of someone deserving. This is the rarest of instances when the punishment fits the crime.