Take a simple mugging, fold in a soupçon of neurosis, a touch of innuendo, and throw it all up on a blog, and what do you get? Bloghorrea.
Like many cases of online conflagration, this one began with a real-life, and truly harrowing, event: a crime. But what it has become, well, you decide:
On Christmas Eve, Doug Rushkoff, a Park Slope writer, got mugged at gunpoint when he took out the garbage from his Seventh Avenue brownstone at around 9 pm.
Like any card-carrying member of the blogerati, Rushkoff repaired to his computer and wrote about the run-in on his Web log, www.rushkoff. com, in a now-disabled posting called, “Merry Christmas: Gimme Your Money.”
“I negotiated with [the mugger] for my health insurance card … because I knew that such a request would humanize me in the mind of my attacker, and make it harder for him to [kill] me,” Rushkoff wrote. “All I lost was my phone, cards, and money.”
His wife, Barbara, contributed to the “conversation” on her blog, A Girl Grows in Brooklyn. (Her entry has also been taken down.)
In the wake of the mugging, she depicted the neighborhood — one of the city’s toniest — as the South Bronx, circa 1980.
“The deep, dark secret about Park Slope is that there’s tons of crime here,” Barbara wrote. “According to the detectives … Manhattan is safe, but Brooklyn is decidedly not.
“Yeah, it’s pretty here, but we are surrounded by crime … It costs $2,000 a year to insure my wedding ring,” she added (wait, she’s complaining about crime, yet bragging on the Internet about her wedding ring?).
Despite statistics, and plenty of anecdotal evidence, that the Rushkoffs’ fears are unfounded, the story of the imperfect crime was picked up by Gothamist, the Brooklyn Record, Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, Gowanus Lounge, and the Daily Slope — all blogs — and was even featured two days in a row on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, which knows a good story when it sees one (one being reported by someone else, that is).
The Rushkoffs’ tale of woe did, of course, elicit sympathy from readers — but not all the commentary fit the crime.
“From a fan’s point of view, it hurts to hear about this incident because I had always visualized you on a pedestal that was high enough to make you immune to the lower forms of humanity,” Morgan23 wrote on Doug Rushkoff’s blog.
“Seeing that this was not true makes me proud of you and ashamed of my own naivete. Thank you for being a member of the human race and congratulations on a situation well handled!”
A man calling himself Cosmo Kramer also extended his regrets, though in a manner befitting the anonymity of the Internet: “Hopefully the Chinese guy who mugged you is hanging upside-down somewhere with a fork up his ass right now.”
Then again, not all the responses were sympathetic.
“[My blog entry] led to some angry emails from homeowners in the neighborhood — claiming that my announcement of the location where I was mugged can affect their property values,” wrote Doug Rushkoff. “One asked, ‘Couldn’t you just say “Brooklyn?”’”
And others found the Rushkoffs, well, wimps.
“Part of living in the city is dealing with what it means to live in a city,” said Shelagh Patterson, a former student at PS 321 who recently moved to Pittsburgh. “I feel like [mugged bloggers] are the people I hope will move out of Park Slope because they are raising all the prices and making it more unaffordable.”
Patterson recalled a time when crime in now-ritzy parts of Brooklyn was an actual issue, rather a way for bloggers to exercise their fingers (just read Jonathan Lethem!).
“When I was growing up, muggings happened in Park Slope, too,” said Patterson. “A lot of my friends carried pepper spray or Mace. I grew up seeing crack vials all the time.”
Having lived through New York’s so-called dark ages, people like Patterson can only shake their head at the Rushkoffs.
Indeed, contrary to Barbara Rushkoff’s argument that Park Slope’s brownstone facade hides a plague of crime, NYPD statistics indicate that the neighborhood has enjoyed an overall downturn in crime.
Police stats show that there were, on average, nine robberies per month in Park Slope in 2006. In contrast, the East Village averaged 20 per month, and the Upper West Side 16 per month.
Moreover, robberies in Park Slope’s 78th Precinct are down 78 percent since 1993, rapes are down 88 percent, and murder is down 57 percent.
But numbers be damned! The Rushkoffs now say they’re planning to follow through on a plan that’s been germinating for over a year — moving out, perhaps even to Westchester.
“[The mugging] feels like a sign,” wrote Doug Rushkoff. “The cops the next day made me feel like a rich, weak, white person who should know better than to think of Brooklyn as ‘safe’ … They said ‘Open your eyes! This is still Brooklyn!’ That had an impact.”
The best news is that Rushkoff has at least resolved to stop airing his personal life on his blog.
“It’s a forum where everybody else gets to be an a—hole but me, even if I’m mugged or pissed off,” wrote Rushkoff. “Like this is supposed to be the f—ing New York Times … This whole thing was an unfortunate error … Do I engage like this in public again? No. I’ll use my private online spaces from now on.”
