If you’re the sort of person who attends community board meetings on weekday evenings so you can be the 473rd person to comment publicly on the city’s latest bike lane proposal, you’re no doubt familiar with Streetsblog, the digital publication that until recently covered all things “livable streets” but is now focused entirely on why the congestion pricing pause means the end of civilization as we know it:
[Kathy Hochul gave them a real gift by pausing congestion pricing because now they can make up any numbers they want.]
Streetsblog’s editor-in-chief is Gersh Kuntzman, a local journalist who has long courted fame by mounting various publicity stunts, with varying degrees of success. For example, in 2016 he wrote a musical set in the Park Slope Food Co-Op:
This mise en scène was highly topical among the Brooklyn elite as the Park Slope Food Co-Op was often in the news at the time because its members were coming to blows over whether or not they should carry Israeli hummus or something, though I’m not sure that same Brooklyn elite was receptive to Kuntzman’s broad sense of humor and phallic references:
In another stunt, he went and fired an AR-15 and wrote about how it gave him PTSD:
Though this one arguably backfired on him when he became a meme for 2nd Amendment advocates, who mocked his constitution and posted this image alongside photos of their young children enjoying the very same weapon at the gun range with no ill effects:
Alas, for many years Gersh Kuntzman was a man without a country, spurned by liberals and conservatives alike. But then in 2022, after lawyer Adam White was arrested for un-obstructing a covered license plate on a parked car, Kuntzman hit paydirt with his “Criminal Mischief” schtick:
Often clad in a homemade Mets helmet and looking like something an AI would generate if you told it to 3D-print you a Hillary Clinton supporter, he’d remove illegal license plate covers, fix mutilated plates, and generally reveal the all the sneaky crap drivers pull to evade tolls and red light cameras, and then he’d post the videos to social media. Usually he’d focus his activities around police stations, courthouses, and municipal buildings, where ironically (yet unsurprisingly) the scofflawism was most rife.
To cycling advocates, urbanists, and the sorts of people who find Israeli hummus problematic and get offended by “Dick Johnson” jokes, Kuntzman was a hero. Meanwhile, the kinds of people who obscure their license plates and who not only like dick jokes but hang testicles off the backs of their trucks denounced him as a weasel and a tool of the establishment, and they predicted he’d soon get his when some driver caught him in the act. But what these people failed to understand was that in order for this to happen a cop or an assistant DA or whoever else is parking in front of these buildings with illegally obstructed plates would have to beat the crap out of a middle-aged man in a Mets bicycle helmet on video, which they’d never do–and in the extremely unlikely event that they did it anyway, Kuntzman would have the scoop of a lifetime and the assailant’s career would be destroyed. For the scofflaw it was a Catch-22, but for Kuntzman it was a win-win.
Cannily, Kuntzman rode the wave, and in so doing he accomplished the two things the sorts of people who shop at the food co-op and wear Mets bicycle helmets want more than anything in the world. The first was to become the subject of a slightly patronizing New Yorker profile:
And the second was to become the subject of a slightly patronizing “Daily Show” segment:
For a certain type of New Yorker this is the very pinnacle of achievement, and there’s really nothing left after that besides an obituary in the New York Times.
I mention all this by way of background, because this past week a Kuntzman disciple in New York City was apprehended while tampering with the license plates of the vehicles of Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter’s Secret Service detail (did you follow that?):
Apparently if you’re gunning for a president the Secret Service will give you ample time to climb up onto a roof and get yourself situated, but if you mess with their cars they’re on you like cream cheese on a bagel:
Here’s video of the thrilling encounter:
I haven’t seen tension like that since “Guarding Tess:”
Actually, I’ve never seen “Guarding Tess.”
As for Kuntzman, he sympathized with the vigilante, though he noted he’s “never messed with the Secret Service:”
But here’s the thing that anyone who’s tempted to do this sort of thing should keep in mind: How would you know? Do you think Harry Heymann knew he was messing with the Secret Service? Or did he just figure the car belonged to some putz from Jersey? The truth is that in a city like New York you never know who’s behind the tinted glass. It could be an undercover cop, or a celebrity, or a soccer mom, or a mobster, or the bodyguard of some visiting dictator who orders beheadings along with his breakfast. When you yell at the driver who almost just killed you, sometimes the only reason they don’t stop to finish the job is that they’re in a hurry to go kill someone else.
For Gersh Kuntzman, this is a calculated risk and an occupational hazard; he’s cultivating a public persona, so it’s worth it to him to do something stupid in the same way it’s worth it to Steve-O to snort wasabi or stick a Matchbox car up his ass. He also knows he’s probably not going to get his ass kicked in front of a police station while someone is filming it, in the same way Steve-O knows he’ll probably survive when he throws himself off an overpass. They’re jackasses, but they’re also “professionals,” and they’re converting their antics into cultural currency. I suspect Kuntzman also knows that fixing license plates is a good way to increase your Twitter follower count, but that when it comes to actual reform he might as well stick a Matchbox car up his ass for all the good it’s likely to do. (To their credit, Streetsblog has in fact gotten results, but that was due to actual reporting, not content creation.)
But what about all the other schmucks who go around confronting drivers in bike lanes and fixing license plates in their spare time? What do they have to gain? In a city like New York, once you start paying attention to how many people are driving with bullshit license plates, or parking in the bike lane, or hopping the turnstile, or littering, or engaging in all the other forms of antisocial behavior and/or system-gaming you see here on a daily basis, you can’t unsee it, and if you remain hyper-focused on it, it will eventually drive you crazy. I know this from personal experience, which is why in recent years I’ve advised against confronting motorists and warned cyclists about the dangers of Pathological Bike Lane Obstruction Fixation Disorder. Do you really need a license plate cover to guard Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter while she eats at Bubby’s? Is this protocol, or are these people just lazy government slobs? I have no idea. But I do think if you’re 45 years old and you’re so addled by license plates that you’re getting arrested BY THE FREAKING SECRET SERVICE and winding up on TMZ then you might want to zoom out a little bit.
I’m not saying you have to completely resign yourself to to the illegal behavior of others, but I am saying that if you want to make a real difference in the world the very best thing you can do is be the happiest and sanest and un-arrested person you can possibly be.
Meanwhile, I recently suggested that gravel bikes are pretentious while road bikes are refreshingly lowbrow, but it turns out I was wrong:
I should probably zoom out instead of letting the world of bikes drive me crazy, but what can I say? It’s a calculated risk.
