Here’s the deal. Rapper Chris Brown used his Twitter account to tell his fans about his ordeal. That consisted of going into a Connecticut Wal-Mart store and discovering, horror of horrors, that the joint didn’t have his new album in stock.
It wasn’t on the shelves, which means it can’t be sold, which means Brown can’t make money. So what did Brown do?
Why, what any American in this color-me-the-victim era would do — claim there was a plot against him. Consider the CNN.com story telling us Brown killed his Twitter account “after claim of album blackballing.” That was the headline; the body of the story gave more details about this curious affair.
“Over the weekend,” the story reads, “Brown went on a tirade after he visited a Wal-Mart store in Connecticut and didn’t see his album on shelves.” According to the story, Brown then Tweeted his fans and told them he “saw for himself” that his album wasn’t on the shelves or in the back. His query to the store manager about why got him nowhere, he claimed.
Brown is still a young man, not wise enough to know that it’s never a good idea to get conspiracy nuts started. The CNN.com story said that his fans Tweeted him back, telling him of their unsuccessful attempts to buy his new album.
Some claimed store managers told them his album would never be on the shelves, while others said they don’t support woman-beaters.
The first rule of journalism is that if your mommy tells you she loves you, then you’d better darn sight check her story. Brown would do well to heed that advice.
A visit to one Connecticut Wal-Mart store does not a trend indicate. There must be thousands of Wal-Mart stores across the nation. My guess is that Brown’s album is being sold in some of them somewhere.
But even if they aren’t, what in the world did Brown expect?
He may have forgotten about beating his then-girlfriend Rihanna all those months ago, but Rihanna hasn’t. She was on the music channel Fuse not too long ago talking about her ordeal. And Brown had best believe the public hasn’t forgotten Rihanna’s ordeal, either.
So there’s a name for the phenomenon of stores not stocking his album, or consumers not buying it. Memo to Brown: This is called payback, sir. It’s also called a “standard of morality.”
If Wal-Mart executives — or managers at many of their stores — refuse to sell your album to protest your vicious treatment of Rihanna, that’s not blackballing. It’s more properly called exercising a standard of morality.
I’m not surprised Brown doesn’t quite grasp that concept. He is, after all, in the entertainment business, an industry that daily seeks to flush down the commode any remaining moral standards the nation has left.
That’s why many in Hollywood have rallied to the cause of film director/child molester Roman Polanski; that’s why a Whoopi Goldberg can try a lame defense of Polanski by claiming what he did wasn’t “rape-rape.”
The entertainment industry is so smitten with Snoop Dogg that it just might take him up on his daffy request. That’s how low folks in the business have taken us. Mark Twain once wittily wrote about aiming for the palace and getting drowned in the sewer.
But honchos in the entertainment industry don’t even bother to aim for the palace anymore. They aim considerably lower than the sewer and then wallow in it after missing their target.
Somebody has to draw some lines and say that beating women isn’t acceptable. If it’s the much-maligned folks at Wal-Mart, so be it.
You’d have thought that someone in the music business would have told Brown he could forget about making another album, but we’re talking about people who have X chromosomes shaped like dollar signs.
And we’re talking about an entertainment industry that’s cranked out film after film of some butt-kicking babe taking out five or six guys at a time.
Brown grew up watching such fare, more than likely. He may be a guilty party in the beating of Rihanna, but he sure has heck isn’t the only one.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
