Welcome back to Straight Shoot. If you haven’t already, catch up on this week’s Raw with our weekly WWE Monday Night Raw recaps write-ups. Then follow writer Aubrey Sitterson on Twitter and make sure to check back every Thursday afternoon for a new Straight Shoot.
Before I get started on an installment of Straight Shoot that will likely get me pilloried in the comments section, I want to issue a couple disclaimers. If at any point in the reading of this you start seeing red or going apoplectic, or thinking that I’m somehow anti-CM Punk or pro-Chris Brown, please scroll back up and have a look-see at these. Then go ahead and get to throwing rotten fruit in the comments.
- Chris Brown is a scumbag. He’s an unremorseful, abusive, violent bully, who is allowed to continue his life and career without any kind of consequence due to the fact that he can sing and dance and young women find him attractive. That’s disgusting.
- I love CM Punk. He’s one of my favorite wrestlers as well as one of the best ones currently working. He’s consistently entertaining, is great on the microphone, and puts on tremendous matches, like the one against Daniel Bryan on this week’s SmackDown that I’m still just wowed over. Don’t believe me? Then check here, here and here.
Onward...
This past week, CM Punk took aim at Chris Brown for being a woman-beater. That in and of itself isn’t so shocking, as the act includes Punk in a humongous group of folks furious at the singer/rapper in the wake of the Grammys. In fact, aside from the absolutely psychotic responses of some of Brown’s less intelligent female fans pretty much everyone agrees with Punk’s desire to “curb stomp” Brown and/or see him “fight somebody that can defend themselves.” But what I’m left wondering is, why is Punk so angry about Brown beating up Rihanna now, and not say, when the pop star was first charged almost three years ago?
I’m certainly not implying that there’s a three-year statute of limitations on being a domestic abuser, especially when the abuser in question hasn’t shown any type of public remorse, but it is interesting that we’re hearing volumes more from Punk now, years after the fact than when those awful pictures of a battered Rihanna first surfaced. It’s not shocking though, because as mentioned above, absolutely everyone quickly re-upped their subscription to the anti-Chris Brown bandwagon following his appearance on this year’s Grammy Awards. That’s exactly what makes it so troubling, however.
Chris Brown.
I don’t have a year to commit to reading every single angry-at-Chris-Brown Tweet, status update, blog and comment from the past week and a half, but I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them are right on the money. On top of that, I even agree with them (see No. 1 above), but I generally question the motivations of people so quick to spit fire and brimstone at a guy for something – something unquestionably awful, no doubt – he did almost three years ago. The people who Tweeted endlessly and flooded Facebook with tirades against Chris Brown were morally outraged, sure, but more notably, they wanted to be seen being morally outraged.
There’s nothing wrong with letting people know you’re upset about something you find reprehensible, in fact, that’s one of the great things about social media: It’s a (mostly) democratic way to spread word about injustices or outrages. But no one was exactly in the dark about what Chris Brown did to Rihanna, so you can’t really classify this as “building awareness,” and the Grammys were already past, so there wasn’t anything left to boycott aside from Brown’s music, which folks who were angriest probably weren’t buying anyway. That makes “advocacy” a difficult claim to make as well. The only remaining motivation for people to go out and publicly rail against a guy that everyone already made their minds up about, one way or the other, almost three years ago was because they wanted to perform moral outrage, and maybe get some retweets, links, blog clicks and above all, attention out of it.
The tweet that started it all.
So that brings us to CM Punk, who, like much of the rest of the internet, vented his spleen on the totally-deserving Chris Brown. I like Punk (see No. 2 above), and nothing that guy has said about Brown is off base. In fact, I’d absolutely love to see Punk eat Brown’s lunch in a shoot fight. Anyone who takes advantage of, abuses, manipulates or otherwise mistreats someone weaker than them – woman, man, or other – is a bully, and not in a “Be a Star” type of way, but in a “completely reprehensible, worst type of human being in the world” type of way, and the only way to properly deal with a bully is to have someone bigger than them kick the everloving shit out of them. I’m completely onboard with this.
So, while I didn’t see how it was necessary, and truth be told, had a hunch that a large part of Punk’s sudden interest in the Brown situation was an attempt to hitch a ride on the zeitgeist, I didn’t have too much of a problem with. After all, I like one guy (No. 2) and don’t like the other (No. 1). But then something interesting, different, and all-around icky began to happen: Punk’s comments against Brown, Brown’s response, Punk’s retort, Brown’s rebuttal, etc. began to get traction elsewhere, becoming a news story in and of itself.
A sampling of TMZ’s coverage of the “Twitter war”
The two’s “Twitter war” got picked up on TMZ, countless other blogs and gossip sites and likely every single wrestling dirt sheet known to man. Never one to pass up free publicity, WWE pounced, making the story the number one focal point on their website (with an article that interestingly leaves out both Punk’s non-TV-PG “curb stomp” comment as well as Brown’s steroid accusations, and even promoted the story on a live edition of SmackDown, with additional commentary by the announce team of Michael Cole, Josh Matthews and Booker T, who went so far as to make a joke about Chris Brown having no problem with putting hands on someone.
All of a sudden, CM Punk speaking out against a convicted woman-beater has been turned into just another angle on WWE television. It’s not a match at WrestleMania (though if you put that past anyone up in Stamford, you’re far more generous than I), but the company is clearly using the story as a way to promote their WWE Champion. The subtext here is, “You hate Chris Brown, right? Well, so does our totally relatable face of the company, and we talk openly about it during our fictional programming!” Even if you agree with Punk’s assessment of Brown, which I certainly do, make no mistake of what is happening here: The world’s top wrestling promotion and purveyor of fictionalized, physical soap operas, World Wrestling Entertainment, has co-opted a real-life case of domestic abuse to promote one of their top stars. And frankly, that’s disgusting.
A snapshot of WWE’s homepage on Wednesday afternoon.
True, it’s not as bad as it could be, as there’s been no specific, explicit reference to the actual domestic abuse on any kind of official WWE programming or web presence, with Booker’s somewhat tasteless comment being as close as it gets. But to say that means this storyline and feud isn’t about domestic abuse is to wear a humongous set of blinders while splitting the finest hairs you can find. There’s certainly a precedent of WWE absorbing real-life stories and events into their programming. When done well it can add an extra sense of realism while also heightening drama and causing fans to question where the work ends and the shoot begins. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially when the people involved are actually employed by the company and actively involving themselves in the angle. That’s far from the case here though.
Once again, I’m not defending Chris Brown (see No. 1), and in fact, I’d like it if more entertainments pointed that guy out as a violent, unremorseful bully, but he’s not the only one involved here. Though she hasn’t gone onto Twitter to rant at either Brown or Punk, Rihanna is inextricably linked to this storyline, and it’s of extremely questionable taste to rope her into this, even indirectly, and even if the endgame is to make Brown look like the mentally-unhinged scumbag that he is.
There’s a fair argument to be made from all this that Punk was just speaking his mind, sounding off on an issue that upsets him, as everyone has the right to do, and that it’s only WWE’s involvement and insistence upon making a buck off the entire thing that turns it into an extremely icky bit of exploitation. And I might even be inclined to agree with you, with the caveat that Punk’s outrage seems rather fortuitously timed, if it wasn’t for the video he posted on TwitVid Tuesday afternoon.
In it, CM Punk goes about cutting a shoot promo on Chris Brown. It’s not in front of a WWE backdrop and neither Josh Matthews nor Matt Striker are anywhere in sight, but there’s no mistaking what it is. In it, CM Punk, who I like and agree with (see No. 2) refutes Brown’s steroid accusations and also makes clear his stance on woman-beaters generally as well as Chris Brown specifically while reiterating his desire to see Brown get his comeuppance, hopefully at his own X-ed up hands. All smart, well-said stuff that I agree with...but it also feels exceedingly hollow.
The reason is that the thing is positioned as a final word on the subject, labeled “This must be said,” as if there was no way that he could let this thing go without addressing it, but anyone with half a brain knew that this wouldn’t be the final word. As soon as he posted it, WWE set about incorporating it into their television broadcast as well as their website, and Brown had some dopey straw man defenses he tweeted out as well. In the video, Punk opens by claiming, “I never intended to include Chris Brown’s name in one of my tweets to start some sort of controversy or gain publicity or anything like that.” That may well be true, but it flies in the face of what he and WWE are actively doing, which is stoking the flames of a controversy that profits directly off of a real-life domestic abuse case, something slightly more serious than the evolutionary development of Santino Marella’s now-spitting Cobra, or whether John Laurinaitis or Teddy Long should run both SmackDown and Raw.
Punk’s response to Brown’s “#notnopunks” tirade, since deleted.
If Punk really didn’t want this to spin into a controversy, he wouldn’t invite Chris Brown to “put some gloves on and get in the ring,” and he definitely wouldn’t promise “I will choke you out, and I’ll make you feel as weak and powerless and as scared and alone as any woman who has had the misfortune of knowing a sad cowardly little boy such as yourself.” If Punk really wanted to hurt Brown, he wouldn’t issue these threats in a video that his wrestling promotion employers and TMZ could then promote wildly, especially since he himself admits in the video that there’s pretty much no chance that a fight between the two will actually happen. Again, I agree with what Punk says here, and I too would love to see him choke out Brown, but if he and the rest of the people feeding the flame of this controversy really wanted to do some damage to the guy, they’d just ignore him and stop giving him the free publicity that clearly has done nothing to damage his reputation with his disturbingly loyal young female fanbase.
I’m not claiming that this is all an orchestrated attempt by Punk to get mainstream attention – I like to think that he’s a better guy than to set about doing something so mercenary and amoral from Jump Street. But, I do think there’s a fair amount of poking-the-bear going on here, and running with something that is clearly working – though there’s no evidence one way or the other as to what Punk’s intentions are here. For all I know, they could be completely honest and morally upstanding – I have no real idea or way of knowing, and neither does anyone else aside from Punk himself. What I do know, however, is that at best, Punk is complicit in WWE spinning him as a participant in a feud based on a case of domestic abuse. At worst, he’s actively engaged in promoting it himself.
Mike Tyson in a WWE ring in 2010.
On top of the delayed, conveniently timed nature of Punk’s outrage and his hollow claims that he didn’t want a controversy, there’s another element that gives me pause in this whole thing: Punk’s distaste for people who hit women seems remarkably inconsistent to me. In his video he characterizes the act of a man beating a woman as completely indefensible under any circumstances, so how does that square with cases that are maybe a little closer to WWE? What about convicted rapist and future WWE Hall of Famer Mike Tyson, whose first wife accused him of both violence and spousal abuse? Where is the moral indignation at him being honored at WrestleMania XXVIII? And how about a wrestler that Punk himself grew up idolizing, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who himself was arrested for, charged with, and later pled no contest to domestic abuse back in 2002? Is Punk similarly furious that “Stone Cold” got away with only a $1,000 fine and 80 hours of community service? What exactly is the difference between these two cases and Chris Brown? One difference, of course, is that Brown’s abuse of Rihanna was more recent, but another, more important one is that it’s what everyone is talking about right now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Punk’s intentions are somewhat less than honorable, but it certainly does hint at it.
Again, I like CM Punk a-lot, and really want to believe the best of him in this and every other situation, but this is an increasingly gross and calculated-looking attempt at getting WWE some mainstream publicity, and it’s currently unclear, to me at least, whether Punk is actively involved in the play, or just a piece that WWE’s amoral marketing machine is moving across the board. What do you think about Punk’s condemnation of Chris Brown and the ensuing controversy, and WWE’s publicity of it? Is Punk a morally upstanding guy taking a stand, someone using an infuriating semi-current event to get himself over, or something in between those two extremes?
