Ouch !!! Al Martinez takes on a local nutjob:

In the beginning, there was the word, then there was the newspaper, then television, then e-mail and today, lo, the blog.

When I first heard the term, I thought it defined a loathsome place of brackish water and quicksand where little children and lost drunks were swallowed up in the gooey mess, never to be heard of again.

One suspected that trolls could be seen around blogs, sneaking in and out of the surrounding underbrush, delighting in the agony they were witnessing.

Since then I have learned that, with some notable exceptions, blogs are largely the habitat of unemployed writers, enraged misanthropes, retired teachers, aging journalists and people who normally pass their time doodling or making obscene telephone calls.

(snip)

And then there is my old colleague Ken Reich.

He is proprietor of a blog he calls "Take Back the Times," which has to do with events that relate to journalistic and political issues, including whatever occurs at the newspaper that once employed him. Recently, he e-mailed me and sent along a posting he was planning to use that involved imaginative conversations with me and with filmmaker and antiwar activist Oliver Stone.

Stone doesn't require my representation in Reich's quaint but disquieting effort at satire, so I'll just leave him out of it and concentrate on the proposed blog's attitudes toward me. For instance:

"Q — What would you have done after 9/11?

"Martinez — Complimented Osama bin Laden on a well-planned operation and started trying to win him over by being nice to him."

Another:

"Q — And what would you have done on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?

"Martinez — Stood down the remaining ships of the U.S. Navy and offered Hirohito Hawaii as a personal possession in hopes the Japanese would be mollified."

And:

"Q — Coming to the present day, what do you think of Saddam Hussein?

"Martinez — I like him personally."

You get the idea.

Generally a pretty good reporter, Reich can be a little flaky sometimes, but this seemed over the top to me. He was implying that I would have applauded a murderer responsible for orchestrating the deaths of 3,000 human beings in the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon, and of "liking" a man on trial for genocide. I e-mailed Reich to the effect that he was way off base.

Acknowledging my "unhappiness," he altered my responses in the final blog, the first quote changed to say, "I'm not fond of Osama bin Laden, but I wouldn't have confronted him in Iraq. Maybe, he'd be more pleasant if we were nicer to him."

And on Saddam Hussein: "I do not like him, personally. But I'm convinced, as Bob Woodward now apparently is, that the Iraq war was a mistake."

In my "answer" to the Pearl Harbor question, he becomes the narrator and concludes, "as far as the past is concerned, Martinez is not such a pacifist after all."

Although I appreciate Reich's effort to "soften" my fanciful responses, it would be wiser of him to offer his opinions in a form more in keeping with his style of bluster and to avoid satire; in other words, return to the bludgeon and leave the stylus to those more adept at using it.