So the latest dispatch from America’s cultural Sodom involves Kanye West, a man whose name has become synonymous with both artistic brilliance and moral bankruptcy. A model, whose identity remains shielded by the BBC, alleges that during a recording session the rapper-turned-autocrat choked her until she was “suffocated and scared.” If true, this is not merely a criminal assault.
It is a symptom of a wider sickness, a civilisation rotting from within. We have seen this before. In the late Roman Empire, the ruling class indulged in ever more grotesque acts of violence and debauchery.
Petronius’s Satyricon describes scenes of such depravity that modern readers blush. Kanye West, with his platinum records and erratic public behaviour, is no different from a proconsul who believed the gods had granted him license to do as he pleased. He is the logical endpoint of a culture that worships fame as the highest virtue.
The model’s account, if credible, should be taken with utter seriousness. But we must also ask: what kind of society produces a man who thinks he can physically overpower a woman in a professional setting? A society that has lost its sense of shame, its moral compass.
Where transgression is rewarded with adulation. Where the artist is treated as a deity whose whims must be obeyed. This is the decadence of the late Roman Republic, where the powerful could purchase, abuse, and discard human beings with impunity.
The parallels are uncomfortable but precise. Of course, the legal processes must run their course. But the cultural indictment is already clear.
Kanye West is a mirror held up to our own corrupt age. Do not look away.
