With Malice Aforethought

Virtual vengeance wreaks collateral damage

If you google my son, you will learn he killed himself with an overdose of Oxycontin. He was reportedly depressed over his non-existent romantic life.

It’s been just two days since I got hit with the dreadful news. I am, mercifully, not devastated: I know Doug is, at long last, in a happy place.

I am not speaking metaphorically of his heavenly home. I mean Doug is literally alive — and very well indeed, having three days ago proudly presented me with an autographed copy of his just-published book, a biography of a 19th-century socialist revolutionary figure, Auguste Blanqui.

It was on account of his book’s debut that I googled my son and was horrified at the suicide report that popped up amidst the pleasantries.

Apparently, some of his disgruntled erstwhile “comrades” — with whom he’d publicly dissented, defecting forthwith from the group on ideological grounds — decided to make the political personal. They virtually killed him — oxymoronically so by his own hand — and spewed the salacious news all over the World Wide Web.

It is unclear whether just the person who posted the details — Nicholas Hughes of “hollaforums” — was guilty of the vicious fabrication. Perhaps the respondents who wove their own threads to buttress Hughes’s web of lies acted unwittingly; perhaps they were in on the “joke.”

Shout out to “holla”: Hey, Nick-with-a-Capital-D — how would you like your mother to learn of your “tragic suicide” while son surfing?