I think there’s a tendency to, when someone says something in strident opposition to what is considered The Absolute Moral Right (whether Absolute pertains to the reader/listener’s own personal internal compass or what they perceive to be the world’s compass) just go completely fucking batshit on that person, as though shaming them will change their mind and redirect them to The Absolute Moral Right.

Unfortunately, the world tends to be a fucking complicated place. Haiti is a country that’s started out pretty screwed up and it hasn’t really managed to ever recover from that initial state. It’s for a variety of reasons. You don’t need a master’s in global politics and history to get the basic gist. Understanding the basics would have probably improved the overall tone of Shirley’s ranticle, but I doubt it would have changed his mind.

It’s ugly and it sucks and I hate thinking about it, but giving aid — especially on the massive scale post-earthquake, post-tsunami, post-Katrina, post-9/11 — should be a point of consideration. Someone’s hurt, dying, sick, bleeding, whatever; the natural human response is, “Oh God! What can I do to help!? Here, have a $5 sent-by-text donation!” And that’s good. I don’t think Shirley ever insinuated it wasn’t.

But donations and aid of any form are only as good as the use to which they are put. Truth, hard and cold. It’s great if we can get together x million dollars to send out into the ether to fund the various humanitarian operations working to get relief to Haitians right now. It’d be better if we could get together x million dollars to send to various humanitarian operations working to rebuild Haiti and make it BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER. We have the technology, my friends.

Something that’s gotten lost in all this mess, to a degree, is the fact that there are actual Goddamn people living in Haiti. At first blush, Shirley’s ranticle read to me as essentially saying, “How dare those poor people be so poor!” And, sure, that’s an easy read to take. It serves to feed the confirmation bias of “Everyone who disagrees with me and doesn’t do so in a manner that I endorse is just doing so to be a troll”. Saying that perhaps the citizens of Haiti aren’t simply victims doesn’t amount to saying that they deserved the decades of abuse prior to now or that they aren’t deserving of any aid at all.

Everybody wants to help Haiti. Some of us are simply not convinced that throwing money in the country’s vague direction is the best plan of attack. If Paul Shirley’s guilty of anything, for my money it’s bad writing.

Now can we all stop being so precious about this and demand that the relief organizations which have received (which is, no matter how you slice it, a lot. One example: http://www.physorg.com/news182698254.html ) openly discuss their tactics for best distributing aid and helping the citizens of Haiti set up an infrastructure that will help minimize the impact of future natural disasters?

If this is what the platform of any credibility that Shirley has/had rests upon then the guy is coming from a very distant and logically-benighted place. But we already knew that. What’s far sadder, and much more frightening, is the dawning realization that his sentiments – or those almost identical – will be passed around like hors d’ouevres or Legionnaires disease at the Tea Bag convention in Nashville this week. In fact, I can envision Shirley walking gleefully into that khaki-and-powdered-wig clusterfuck to the biggest standing ovation of his life (he plays Spain, right? There aren’t direct flights from Bilbao to Nashville yet, are there?).

All of this is a fair mistake for a guy who doesn’t write about geopolitics…until he writes about geopolitics. What isn’t fair – what’s galling – is that his failure to mention, let alone synthesize any of the above objective historical realities means he either didn’t know (or care) to look for them, or, once having found them, presumed they were propaganda. Let’s give him a benefit of the doubt (and a presumption of a work ethic) and guess it’s the latter.

A monster problem for people who are geopolitical dilettantes is pro forma skepticism. That is to say, looking at an event with the expectation that two opposing narratives exist and presuming that both are necessarily partisan or ideological and therefore cancel.

That applies often enough to propaganda. But economic history is not commonly propaganda. In fact, it’s a great rule of thumb that very, very little that is boring to read is or can even be propaganda. Also, things that are boring to read have the additional quality of not being diametrically opposable. Read enough and then you can triangulate a defensible position, not before.

In short, if you haven’t yet been bored by your research on a subject, you haven’t done enough of it and should keep your yapper shut.

Unless you’re recklessly whoring for clicks. And if you’re doing that, fuck you.

Tom.