ROY EDROSO

When CrankWatch launched nine months ago, it was mostly mainstream news and commentary sources that lacerated my heart with fierce indignation. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, a lot of hooey was spoken, going largely unanswered for whatever reasons. So I took it upon myself to politely point out some of the extant errors in logic and humanity.

My subjects were initially mainstream pundits, from whom I naturally felt myself at a great remove. These were volume dealers in hot air, lords and ladies of official opinion; I was a mere gadfly, speaking softly in a little-trafficked corner of cyberspace. My tone then was, in consequence, more of sorrow than of anger.

Over time, I crossed paths with the warblog phenomenon--or, as its practitioners called it (echoed by no less a logist than William Safire--the blogosphere. These much smaller vendors were at least as conservative as National Review Online and Opinion Journal (though some of them have disputed this, despite the copious evidence of their writings), but generally more full-throated in their enthusiasms.

The charmingly named War Now! remains perhaps the best example of the phenomenon. Its author announces in his header, "Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!" Of late he has restated the current conflict--that great, shapeless war against enemies unnamed by means unspecified--as an epochal battle of the Anglosphere versus all of Islam. War Now! is a relative accomodationist, though, for he wishes only to "reform" Islam, while there are warbloggers who find it necessary to destroy it.

I came to notice that the Draconian politics of warbloggers comprised only one distinguishing characteristic of their species. Their social habits were also remarkable. They invoked each others' names constantly, in touching, communal gestures from their lonely carrels of computer-assisted journalism. These included obsessive cross-referencing, cross-linking, and back-patting.

Thus tender with one another, they were savage with their enemies. "Noam dares speak 'the truth'?" roared Matt Welch, "This asshole lies every time he opens his mouth...reading it makes me want to puke." "Lileks...pimp-slaps the zit-popping 'Eric A. Blair,'" snarled PejmanPundit. (Further down: "Jak King: Liar.")

Perhaps to compensate for their frequent outrageousness, warbloggers insisted that their opinions and invective were only common sense and plain speaking. They even invented another catch-phrase, "anti-idiotarianism," to represent themselves. If you disagreed with them, you were an idiot. Talk about a conversation-stopper!

No longer were the voices of unreason distant and impersonal. It seemed as if they were roaring right under my apartment windows. And I began to take it all a little more personally.

This has been seen to some extent in my writing here, but more so in my contributions to Warblogger Watch, to which I was invited to contribute. There I became engaged in some pissing matches with warbloggers, which at first was kind of fun, for even Idiotarians are not immune to a sense of community, even when its expression is negative.

Of late, though, I have felt a profound weariness over the whole business. I recently passed my eyes over some bit of text culled from the blogosphere--I can't recall where--that seemed to sum up the reason:

"Watch out Meryl Yourish, you have an Indymedia bogey on your tail!"
"I see him, Stephen DenBeste, nothing I can't handle"
"We've got a major Fisk article coming in, who's up?"
"Okay Joshua Trevino, use Mark Steyn, he's got a killer line on Fisk in his latest column."
"Chomsky alert! He's using an Edward Said quote this time - aiming at NRO. We think John Derbyshire may be the target. Constant bearing, decreasing range!"
"Relax, Derb can handle Noam in his sleep. We're needed over at the CNN message board, Lou Dobbs could do with some support."
"Roger that. Shouldn't take long. Ice up a cold one, we're on our way back to base..."

While I have nothing against military gaming fantasies as a means of relieving pent-up aggression, I found something especially unseemly in this. At length I realized why: I had bought into this fantasy myself. I had been trifling with fools in online taverns when I should have been shaking the Anglosphere with the thunder of my spirit--or, to put it in less grandiose terms, I had got caught up in a silly game when seriousness was in order.

For despite their we-are-the-future claims, the warbloggers (and, it must be said, we their nemeses) are merely extra voices in an already overcrowded field of ideological combatants, ostensibly working to uncover truth, but mainly adding to an already intolerable din. It reminds me of the old punk rock dream: When everybody had a band (or, in a more recent version of the dream, ProTools), there would be a new rock renaissance. Well, now pretty much everyone has a band, and rock sucks. Widening the stream does not concentrate its force.

How then to proceed? Not to stop, exactly, but to proceed with caution; not in silence, exactly, but in quiet. There's still a lot of nonsense to digest, and the Internet is still the cheapest medium for publishing such considerations. And it's not out of the question that some independent venomist might draw me back into the fighter-pilot game. But for the time being, I expect to follow Rilke's advice: "What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end--that is what you must be able to attain."

In other words, write as if no one is reading. It's close enough to the truth.