There is a scent in the air. It is the stench of rotting grandeur, the unmistakable reek of a civilisation that has mistaken fame for virtue and spectacle for substance. The latest effluvium comes courtesy of a model who alleges that Kanye West choked her.
The BBC, in a rare spasm of institutional courage, has launched an investigation into systemic celebrity cover-ups. And we are meant to be shocked. But should we be?
The Roman satirist Juvenal might have called this a routine afternoon. The Victorians would have tsked and swept it under the Persian rug. We, however, are expected to gasp, to tweet, to moralise from the comfort of our digital amphitheatres.
The pattern is as predictable as the tides: a celebrity, a woman, a whisper network, a half-hearted inquiry, a settlement, a sigh of collective relief. Then silence. Then another story, another name, another sordid detail that blurs into the next.
The machinery of celebrity is built on the systematic exploitation of the vulnerable. It is a feudal system with better lighting. In the old world, the lord had droit de seigneur.
Today, the producer has his casting couch, the rapper his hotel suite. The BBC's investigation may bring a fleeting moment of accountability. But let us not pretend that this is a corrective.
It is a palliative, a bandage on a suppurating wound. We love our celebrities too much to let them fall. We need them, you see.
They are the gods of our secular age, the mythic figures who distract us from the creeping decay of our institutions. And like the gods of old, they are monstrous, cruel, capricious. We demand their downfall and then we mourn their loss.
It is a cycle as old as Parnassus. Kanye West is merely the latest avatar of a centuries-old archetype: the genius whose excesses are excused because he produces art. But art is no excuse for barbarism.
And genius, if it ever truly exists, is no defence against the moral law. We have forgotten that, in our rush to deify the talented. The Victorian era, for all its hypocrisy, understood the importance of a stiff upper lip, of the line not crossed.
We have erased that line. We have replaced it with a moral relativism that excuses everything in the name of creativity. The result is a culture that is both decadent and cruel.
We consume the products of our idols while ignoring the human wreckage they leave behind. We are complicit, every one of us who streams the music, who watches the film, who clicks on the headline. The BBC investigation is a mirror, not a window.
It reflects our own moral squalor. We demand justice but refuse to pay the price: the banishment of the artist, the dismantling of the machinery that enables him. We want the art without the guilt.
And so we will have neither. The model's allegation is a cry in the dark. It will be heard, briefly, and then it will fade.
The celebrity machine will churn on, a Moloch that devours the innocent and is fed by our attention. The only question that remains is whether we have the courage to look away.
