When news broke that Donald Trump, his wife, and several members of his staff tested positive for COVID-19, many of the president’s resolutely secularist detractors immediately saw this as divine retribution. Kevin Williamson comments:
In the 1980s, the belief that God was inflicting a horrible, deadly disease on people as a punishment for their sins and to make an example of them was the kind of thing trafficked in by . . . low-rent bigots. Today, it is an idea put forward by, among others, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and the comedy writers of Saturday Night Live. . . . “In a moment that feels biblical,” Dowd writes in her invariably banal New York Times column, “the implacable virus has come to [the president’s] door.” Imagine having written that about, say, Michel Foucault in 1982 or Freddie Mercury in 1987.
Saturday Night Live reveled in Trump’s being shown up by a partnership of “science and karma,” which is a strange pairing. . . . (Whatever you think of karma, it is not scientific.) But the writers of SNL don’t take such propositions any more seriously than Maureen Dowd does the adjective “biblical,” which she seems to take as a synonym for “poetic” or “ironic.”
About that karma: Westerners cut off from Christianity—and, hence, cut off from the mainstream of Western civilization—have an especial weak spot for vaguely understood Eastern concepts. Karma may be the most abused of them, but zen is in the running, too. . . . The culturally deracinated may not entirely understand the nature of their predicament, but they cast about instinctively for a paradigm within which to organize their prejudices and sensibilities, and so sundry exotic spiritualisms come into fashion because they provide the illusion of an organizing principle without all that yucky “Thou shalt not!”
Zen is a category of housewares on Amazon, and karma is how American cowards say, “He had it coming.”
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/trump-covid-19-and-karma