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  • 2009-01-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Letter to Mugger (no)
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  • A common form of writing employed in expressing a sense of injustice is for the wronged party to pen a sarcastic apology to the party who did him harm: An accident victim apologizes for being in the path of the drunken driver who smashed into his car, an innocent bystander apologizes for being within earshot of a couple who inappropriately engages in a loud public argument, the owner of a burglarized home apologizes for having installed so many extra locks, etc. The examples reproduced above are an inversion of this form, one in which the writer does not express hurt and outrage at having been victimized or inconvenienced, but rather crows about having turned the table on his antagonist. The author here is not a passive target who ends up stripped of his valuables by a mugger; he is an intended victim who confronts his assailant with superior firepower (i.e., a gun vs. a knife), strips the would-be robber of his cell phone, clothes, and wallet, and completes the humiliation of the vanquished in a variety of ways (e.g., showing the mugger to be a coward by noting that he messed his pants out of fright, buying gas on his credit card, using his cell phone to place calls to phone sex numbers, giving his clothes and money away to the homeless). This piece began its life as a Jan. 6, 2009 post to Craigslist, a forum for local classified ads and discussions in more than 550 cities. It was quickly removed by that entity, lasting no more than a day or two on that site, but nevertheless was picked up and sent around in e-mail by those it resonated with. There was no mugging: the whole tale was a work of fiction meant to help its author work off some steam from having had his home broken into. Of its creation, he says, I mean, all it took was a couple of beers, some aggravation towards the local criminal population, and five to ten minutes at the keyboard. He has since seen his fanciful tale reworked to further various agendas and says of that process I'm starting to see people alter the hell out of it for political and other reasons, and quite frankly, that just irritates the shit out of me. Over time, several different cities came to be named as the location of the felonious interaction, including: In February 2010 we encountered this South African version: (en)
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