I’ve been following the Chris Brown story a bit more than I would normally follow an issue like this. Basically the guy is a violent subhuman felon who drove his then girlfriend home, punching her in the face and causing her to spit up blood all over the inside of his vehicle. She sustained cuts on her elbows from trying to shield herself, lost her phone after he threw it from the car when she tried to access help, and was repeatedly told that her attempts to contact other people were a mistake that she would be killed for when they arrived at their destination.
Oh he’s an R&B singer too. He’s so revered as an R&B singer and role model despite the fact that nothing I’ve written so far is a secret, that he was key to the “Grammys” which is where luminaries in the copyright industry compete to see who is capable of the most effusive displays of self congratulation.
The majority of online communities got predictably upset by this, largely because a quorum of people with sufficient brain power to operate a device that allows you to opine on the Internet condemn people like Brown. That isn’t my tacit endorsement of their reasons or approaches; I’ve read and have varying opinions on how it’s a race issue, a gender issue, it’s about music culture and victim shaming and violence apologism and an issue owned by a million other communities with a million barrows to push. I’m not concerned about that at the moment, I’m concerned about a particular sub-group of the people online who are demonstrably capable of the rational thought process that go into paying an Internet bill but still either
a) think Brown’s behaviour is excusable or too trivial to need to be excused or
b) are visibly frustrated at what they see as dissent which has overrun its due course or
c) both
Brown, or his marketing machine, have named his fan base “team Breezy” and from this particular group of people (I use the noun out of laziness) most of the hand waving and dismissal comes, but there was a gold standard of stupid that were online last night. Crown’s exhibit 1;
“Ah I see Geordie” I hear you say, “You’re amusing and your highbrow ‘evidence’ quip is to draw our attention to those people you are annoyed at, clever!” I hear you say.
Horseshit.
I always knew THEY were there, I’m angry at the response to them. I’m agape at the column inches and kilobytes of download quota dedicated to them because there is a fucking giant point missing in every word I’ve read and I get the sneaking fucking suspicion that when I do finally come across it it’s going to be in an indignant broadsheet that otherwise characterises it as an “Internet thing” or it’s going to be out of the mouth of someone whose politics sits somewhere to the right of the distilled essence of One Nation and I’m going to feel obligated to punch them in the fucking throat.
Everything I’ve read in response to people making light of Brown’s vicious attack on someone who trusted him, has been to frame it in terms of how unwell they are. How they aren’t right and they need to seek help. I’m even seeing day two commentary in which the fathers of these (predominantly) girls have failed them, or how society has failed them by allowing that sort of behaviour to be acceptable. That we can expect this sort of thing because we’ve created a misogynistic culture, or made violence against women normal and OK. It’s not them, it’s us, and it can be put right. You know what? This is 24 carat, uncut, refined, distilled, no added permeate, organic free range bullshit. It’s bullshit so dense that every kilo of it weighs more than a thousand tonnes. The reason these people made light of the actions of a person who committed one of the most indecent crimes that statues prohibit is because they are bad people.
Remember bad people? They’re what we had before every course of societally unacceptable behaviour was a pathology. Before being an arsehole wasn’t a reason for people to condemn your actions and ostracise you, but the DSM IV-based beginning of a twelve step program of some description. Bad people wasn’t a condition, which then evolved into bad person disorder, then a spectrum of disorders, “Bad people” was a declaration that you could understand and act onbut now it’s gone and we have nobody responsible for anything - it’s just a disease you know?
Fuck all of that. I want the concept of bad people back. Chris Brown is a bad person because he had a romantic relationship with someone who trusted him and wanted to be around him, and he punched her repeatedly in the her face with his fists until he broke it. Every person who thinks it’s funny or cool to diminish domestic violence or portray themselves as willing to suffer violence to attract celebrity attention is a bad person. Maybe there is a way for all of these bad people can become not bad people, but if I spent days and months under a skilled mentor with all the required tools I still couldn’t give less of a shit. I think we spend too much time talking about moving forward like human personalities are some scarce resource and we need to cure evil people of their evil so there are sufficient principled, fair, honest, peaceful people to be around. It’s not the case. There are ample men and women out there who are not bad. We don’t need to investigate and fix evil, we can just punish it, or ignore it. Fuck “why”, they don’t deserve investigation, diagnosis and cure because it’s just not that complicated.
Whatever we do, we don’t make them involved in the running of an awards ceremony, or hypothesise about our role in their existence. Every second we spend doing that is wasted.
