Cleanup on Track 8

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has kept his name at the top of papers by making an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show and making comments like "I like Hitler," and "They did good things, too. We've got to stop dissing Nazis all the time."

I won't belabor the point, given that I brought this up a month ago, but I think it's somewhat irrational to expect someone with known mental illness to be completely, well, rational; even when in front of an audience.

But the train wreck that Ye's life is becoming is going to generate a lot of clicks, and a lot of airtime for random people to denounce him, or hold forth about how harmful his words are. Because people are fascinated to watch him destroy his life in slow-motion and on full public display. It's the dark side of being a celebrity; it's not generally considered exploitative to watch someone go head-to-head with mental illness and have their head handed to them when that someone is already famous.

Of course, there is also the fear factor; the idea, hovering in the background that someone like Ye is, for all of his obvious problems, popular and respectable enough to bring the ethno-nationalist chauvinism of 1930s National Socialism back into vogue and kick off a round of modern pogroms against the Jewish population of the United States. I understand it; there is a similar suspicion in the Black community of the United States that all it takes are a few charismatic people in the right (or wrong) places to bring back Jim Crow, if not all-out slavery again. That said, it still doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility anytime soon. Treating everyone who expresses support (regardless of their mental health) for the atrocities of the past as an open invitation for those atrocities to repeat themselves overdoes it. Those times are gone. They can, of course, return. But it will take more than the flameout of an ill celebrity to restore them.