No Rocket Ships “Abbott and Costello Go to Mars” was always one of my favorites. As a kid growing up on the Jersey Shore somewhere between the New York and the Philly TV markets channel 11, WPIX, held a special place for me. After Mass on Sunday mornings, always at 11:30, the two funny guys from Jersey were ready to entertain 25 years after the fact. So, Lou and Bud somehow accidentally steal a rocket ship. The plot and story don’t matter now. The scene is the two of them piloting the shining silver (I guess from the black and white film) rocket ship around New York City. The exchange, as best I remember, is classic in my head. It goes something like this: “You got fifty cents?” asks Costello. “Why?” asks Abbott. “We’re about to go through the Lincoln Tunnel.” Besides loving the joke, I love that even on this journey they somehow start from New Jersey in the middle of it all. I love the toll is only fifty cents. They make it through the tunnel without a ticket from a Port Authority cop and zip all over Manhattan in their glimmering sliver rocket ship. I believe even the Statue of Liberty ducks down for them as they fly over her. It is grand fun all together. As I climbed out of the station from the 6 train on a perfect Tuesday morning, September 11, 2010, and walked Canal Street east this massive jet went zooming passed before me down the Westside. “Fuck, that thing is flying low,” I said to myself. It looked just like Abbott and Costello’s rocket ship. It was fast and shining in the morning sun. When I got the next corner I looked to the left and saw it was in the North Tower.

[W]ith the rush to war in Iraq came the phenomenon of "warbloggers" -- online belligerents who hollered for invasion and denounced all foot-draggers as traitors. They thought themselves a new breed of patriot, rescuing the nation from post-Vietnam drift, but were merely a useful feeder stream for a new jingoism that enmeshed America in foreign morasses wherein we remain hopelessly bound today. One of the warblogs OGs, Matt Welch, looked back in 2006 on those heady times and reflected, "Man, was I wrong." Nonetheless he admitted, "I can't shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away." By "cross-partisan," of course, he meant that some people joined his bellowing who later grew hoarse and unsure; there were others who disagreed from the start, but they were disregarded, because they were not part of the great new blog thing.

As a consumer, it was exponentially more edifying to me than the post-9/11 fumblings of the mainstream media's binary, Crossfire-style opinion slinging. "What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?" I enthused [in this December 2001 post]. "I'd say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s...a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review." Man, was I wrong. Michelle Malkin, to name one writer revered by warbloggers (her site recently won Best Blog in an annual poll organized by RightWingNews.com), is to critical thinking what Ralph Nader is to libertarianism—a very good example of the opposite. The basic scholarship of her 2004 book In Defense of Internment was cut to ribbons by Japanese-internment historian Eric L. Muller (see "Indefensible Internment," December 2004), yet many of the same people who once trumpeted bloggers' ability to "fact-check your ass" simply shrugged, continued treating Malkin as a trustworthy source, and saved their real journalism criticism for those partisan hacks at CBS News and The New York Times.

the warblogger era ('member that?), when alleged former liberals like Matt Welch and Jeff Jarvis would bellow that the scales had been torn from their eyes, revealing to them the necessity of invading Iraq. I notice that they're not similarly rallying to the call to invade Yemen, which suggests such epiphanies have a more limited shelf life than once was thought, as well as a longer, subsequent period of buyer's remorse.

Nonetheless some people, including many less critical than me, got the impression the warbloggers supported some wars. So maybe "warblogging" was a misnomer all along, and they should have called it critical-thinkingblogging, or laughing-out-loudblogging. That might have cleared up some confusion, and spared us all some grief.

Welch spent much of his early warblogging days (and some of his later ones) beating up opponents of the war(s). ("I understand today -- really, for the first time in my life -- why for much of Middle America the word 'liberal' is a pejorative," etc). I suppose you could say this is not the same thing as being an "advocate for war." I think it's a distinction without a difference.

As a rule ballplayers and police get along remarkably well. Each knows that belting a girl around in a car is just clean, wholesome fun. The cop also knows the player can't stand having any such experience make the newspapers. [...] Belinsky's cop was of a different breed. He was forced into action by the sight of the bleeding girl on the street. He took Bo, Dean [Chance], and the girl down to the imfirmary where the girl was sewn up and repaired. The police were attempting to get the girl to sign a complain against Belinsky for assualt. She considered it and then told Bo, "I won't sign if you promise to stay with me all week." Belinsky thought discretion was the better part of valor, so he agreed to her untenable demands. "You think she showed any gratitude?" said Bo. "Hell, no. Three months later she gets a smart attorney and sues me in a civil action for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. My lawyer had to give her a few bucks to get her out of town and shut her up. You just can't trust broads."

"I don't even know how it came about, but I got a date with Queen Soraya of Iran. I think it was after her marriage with the Shah had busted up and she was trying to make it in the movies or something. She was nice but she was a little weird. She was into all that mystical stuff, witchcraft, everything far out. She had blown her crown because she didn't have a son for the Shah, and now she was asking the witches for all the answers. But really a nice broadie."

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.