Whenever Jeff Jarvis gets to the top of blogdex again, I know I am going to have something to write about. Doesn’t anyone stop to see through this guy before starting to murmur appreciatively? Recently, the buzz has been about his impassioned plea in support of Spirit of America, a program which organizes donations of supplies from the American people to the Iraqis ‘to help them rebuild.’ (Ominously, though, the donations are not, it seems, really to the Iraqis. See below.) Jarvis feels that, whatever one’s position on the war, this serves both our human obligation and enlightened self-interest. When he mentioned self-interest, for a moment there I expected he would confide in all candor that he hoped our good will would somehow buy us some leniency in the face of the Islamic fundamentalist rage likely heading for us innocent Americans for our government’s imperialist hauteur in the Middle East. Instead he’s just trotting out those tired old chestnuts about

“creating a foothold for democracy, freedom, modernity, civilization, and just friendship in the Middle East”

(Tired chestnuts is what you might expect given the hokey name of this organization…). As it turns out, paying protection seems closer to what this is all about; more on that later.

I’m stronger on the moral obligation side of this than the self-interest side, I must admit. Although I find it extremely naive to hope that individual efforts like this can compensate for the impact of the barbarian rape and pillaging of Iraq done in our names by our unelected government, I believe in asserting the moral distinction that it wasn’t me doing it. On second thought, maybe that is self-interest, since it is so much more to comfort me in my moral superiority than to do anything real…

Moreover, Jarvis seems to be caught up in a puzzling agenda of making this a special cause for webloggers, despite the fact that all the mission statements from SoA principals he quotes have a grander vision of signing up “a million Americans”. Jarvis’ reach exceeds his grasp — he does not seem to recall that only around 4% of those Americans who are even online read weblogs. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jarvis hopes that his contribution to rebuilding Iraq will be — hold your breath — to bring weblogging to the Iraqi masses with “blogging tools translated into Arabic and free blog hosting, for example.” I’ll break it to you gently, Jeff — most of us recognize that it is far more urgent to rebuild the material infrastructure destroyed by the serial tyrannies of the Saddam Hussein regime and the US invasion than to implement any pie-in-the-sky notion of getting thousands of Iraqi Jarvis-clones mouthing tired clichés about democracy mostly for the consumption of the Western Internet audiences. But trust a TV Guide executive all puffed up about his influence on the “blogosphere” to think outside the box. Get a life. Here comes a controversial assertion — weblogging is more an effect than a cause of participatory democracy during nation-building, and it is a rather late effect at that. It is just on the cusp of having an impact on the political process in ‘mature’ democracies such as the US and Western Europe. (Oh, I forgot for a moment; Iraq will be springing full-blown into that mature stage of democracy under US tutelage, right after the June 30th reversion of ‘sovereignty’, right?)

Next, let us consider for a moment that philanthropic efforts end up all across the map in terms of efficiency, administrative costs and overhead in delivering aid, vulnerability to misappropriation or diversion of funds or goods along the way, etc. For any given charitable contribution, how many cents on your contributed dollar actually end up doing direct good at the target end can vary wildly. Picking your charities responsibly, much less starting and administering an effective and efficient relief organization, is far from a no-brainer, no matter what instant pundits and erudite commentators we webloggers of the world fancy ourselves to have become. So, until proven otherwise, SoA sounds much more like a feel-good than a do-good organization.

And that was before I got a look at the SoA website and figured out what is really going on. It appears that most of the goods your donations to SoA would be buying are to be distributed by the US military

• the Marines and SeaBees are giving tools to Iraqi tradesmen they train
• the Marines are giving school supplies, balls and frisbees to Iraqi children “to improve relations with Iraqis and reduce conflict”
• Air Force chaplains are seeking supplies for orphanages and schools

Take a look at this quote from their website, for instance:

“Americans in uniform delivering supplies to schools and orphanages demonstrates that Americans care about helping Iraqis move toward a brighter future. Let’s give our servicemen the supplies that are most needed for them to help Iraqi children…”

In other words, it appears that your donations would not go so much to rebuild Iraq as to attempt to placate the restless heathen masses with small bribes. It sounds abit like the 21st century equivalent of giving firewater to the Injuns…or blood money. Cynical me, but I wonder if the goodwill and humanitarian urges of the Children’s Crusade of webloggers Jarvis hopes to recruit aren’t being blatantly co-opted. Is it a stretch to suggest that the Bush administration is trying to privatize the reparations it ought to be paying for its war crimes?

And please don’t tell me that this assistance has to be distributed by the US military because NGO’s from the UN on downward are too skittish to risk functioning in Iraq yet. That only proves my point about the ill-advised haste in luminaries like Jarvis backing a hare-brained scheme like this when the experts we ought to trust know that development aid is premature. The US has dismantled a nation with no compensatory planning, is reaping the consequences of what it has sown, and this effort is nothing but a blatant propaganda attempt to unmire us from a morass of our own making. Youa re being suckered, Jarvis.

A humble suggestion — the moral imperative is all on the side of dissociating oneself from this essentially immoral effort, not acquitting one’s obligation by enthusiastically buying in. It seems to me that it would be more useful, if one is interested in avoiding wasted effort in rebuilding Iraq, to do something much more difficult — get the stars out of your eyes and catalogue and compare the existing humanitarian NGO’s doing this sort of work, run by professionals who have charity- and nation-building experience. Can anyone point me to any resources they have come across along those lines?

Jarvis points to (but does not deign to respond to) a dissent by Dave Winer here. Even though I am quite skeptical about this whole SoA venture and Jarvis’ boosterism, neither do I find Winer’s position well thought out. In saying,

“I think the best thing the US can do for the world is get our own house in order and stop trying to fix the world, something we’re exceedingly bad at,”

he shows he has no ability to maintain the crucial distinction between the American people and the American government under Bu**sh**. If Jarvis’ position is naive feel-good boosterism, Winer’s throws out the baby with the bathwater.

“In ‘The Way the Music Died,’ Frontline follows the trajectory of the recording industry from its post-Woodstock heyday in the 1970s and 1980s to what one observer describes as a ‘hysteria’ of mass layoffs and bankruptcy in 2004. The documentary tells its story through the aspirations and experiences of four artists: veteran musician David Crosby, who has seen it all in a career spanning 35 years; songwriter/producer Mark Hudson, a former member of the Hudson Brothers band; Hudson’s daughter, Sarah, who is about to release her first single and album; and a new rock band, Velvet Revolver, composed of former members of the rock groups Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, whose first album will be released in June.

But how will these artists fare at a time when the record industry is clearly hurting?”

“Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it. ” Polier, both a political junkie and a journalist herself, writes an account combining her very personal suffering as a victim of vicious political rumormongering, her detailed public denial, and an investigation of the sources of the rumor.

“It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school.”

In this case, she (and I) was surprised to find that the baseless rumors that she had slept with Kerry (she was actually dating his campaign finance manager for awhile) apparently arose not from the Bush team as she had expected but were at least partly attributable to the Wesley Clark campaign organization, such as it was. Of course, the Right made hay with the rumors, but neo-con zealot and former Bush speechwriter David Frum actually apologized publicly when he learned they were not true. Bottom-feeder Matt Drudge, to whose rumors the media are now indentured servants, too nervous not to listen for fear they will miss another scoop like Lewinsky, also gets quoted by Polier as regretful for his role… a little regretful at least. A good friend of Polier’s in Washington, who works inside the Republican machine, was instrumental in embellishing on Polier’s acquaintance with Kerry to further the Republican cause as well. I hope Polier has learned to choose her friends more wisely; loyalty is a cheap commodity in the political world. (New York Magazine via Richard; thanks!)