I recently returned to CNN.com’s Blogger Bunch to discuss Chris Brown’s community service sentence. (And I didn’t have any technical problems this time. Hooray!)

I got to say almost everything I wanted, but you know… I like to talk, so I didn’t get everything in. Just below the video, I’ll share the point I didn’t make on air.

My co-panelist Russell Wetanson makes the point that this is only day one of Chris Brown’s community service and that while he’s all smiles now, he may be in a much different, more penitent place by day 180.
Agreed. But that will be Brown’s personal story. Whether we like it or not, a celebrity in the justice system also tells a larger cultural story, and right now, the story being told about Brown’s punishment for abusing Rihanna is that he’s getting slapped on the wrist. He’ll be inconvenienced with some trash duty, but otherwise he’ll be fine.

If the media picks this story back up at the end of his community service, and if he seems more repentant, then the cultural story of his punishment will change. It will say something about the consequences of domestic abuse. But will that story be told? Will the media go back for more? I don’t know.

And besides—and this is the main thing I wanted to say—the rapper T.I. recently went to jail for a weapons charge, but before he did, he released a single (“Dead and Gone”) expressing his regret for his violent past, published an essay on the Huffington Post about what he’d learned, and made lots of other public gestures to tell people what he’d done was wrong. I don’t know what his personal story is, but he created a cultural story about regret and rehabilitation, and that’s the story that’s going to resonate with his fans. It’s the story that might teach people something about living a less violent life.

At the start of his community service, Brown’s cultural story is saying that domestic violence can result in living up while you wear an orange vest. The story may change later, but it didn’t have to begin that way to start with.