I don’t mean that he will never go to jail at all, because everything that goes up must come down, and eventually studio lawyers and PR people can only do so much for a person who is completely intent in ruining their own life. But for now, in this country, Chris Brown is untouchable, and not just because he’s rich and famous.
What we have here is the classic good vs. evil battle, that we are so familiar with from comic books and action movies, but that we rarely recognize in daily life, even though it’s there. A hero can be as amazing as Superman, as brutal as Batman and as witty as Spiderman, but the truth we all know is the villain crosses a line that the hero can not cross. Would any of us repeatedly punch, choke, or bite our girlfriend? Would any of use attempt make freeway pizza out of the woman we loved? No, but Chris Brown would. Would we go on national TV and pitch a fit in the green room, smash a window and get mad when they reported it? Chris Brown would. Would any of us put the lives of others in direct and indirect danger because we didn’t get our way, despite the fact that we already have legions of devoted fans, more money than we could ever reasonably spend, and good looks on top of that? The Joker Chris Brown would.
The problem with people isn’t that most of them are bad. They’re not, and that’s a good thing. But one of the drawbacks of being mostly good in a society, is that when we do get a line crosser, we’re ill-equip to deal with it.
Everybody wants their sacrificial lamb, that’s what The Jersey Shore is for, but people really want their first impressions to be true. They want their lines to remain uncrossed. Yeah, Ronny from Jersey Shore is obviously a woman beater, but we knew he was bad all along. Chris Brown takes pictures with puppies, Chris Brown is a Nickelodeon sweetheart, Kids Choice Award darling, Chris Brown doesn’t bite women, or break windows, or steal phones when he’s already on probation for biting a woman (and punching her, and choking her, and threatening to murder her.) But he does, and instead of following the rules and being appropriately remorseful for the things he’s done and taking his licks like a good celebrity, he tweets at all of us to eat a dick because he has a Grammy and we don’t. Well, most of us don’t.
Anyway, the reason Chris Brown will not serve jail time is because there are infinite second chances for a person like him. The shit he did, and the way he did it is so completely outrageous that we’d all rather be in denial that we’re the type of society that puts a 16 year old boy on an international stage, but then gets incredulous when he has no adult life skills. People are aching for his apology, for his redemption. His prescribed next move is to keep his fat head down long enough for this all to blow over, and when he refuses to do that, society is at a loss.
If he’s bad, and we made him what he is, does that mean that we’re bad? Yeah, we’re a little bit bad. Society can make you a star, and society can tear you down again, but society can’t make you a sociopath. That’s a condition that you’re born with. It takes a special kind of man to be one of the worst human beings anybody knows and still tell the world to suck your balls. That’s a line nobody will cross to go after your ass.
And that’s why Chris Brown won’t be seeing the inside of a jail (for awhile anyway.) He’ll go to anger management, or he’ll go to rehab, in Malibu, on the beach. But if he doesn’t go to jail, we can all still walk around in denial. We deny that we made a monster, but in so doing we fail to see he was a monster already, we just made it okay for him to be as bad as he possibly could be. And we continue to do so.