I’ve been watching with amusement as a genuinely interesting question – the overlap between one’s actions in ‘meatspace’ and one’s role as a blogger – deteriorates into a somewhat sordid pissing contest and score-settling both between the anti-Dean Right and the Dean folks (including Kos and Jerome) and within the pool of ex-Dean staff and supporters.

I will shake my head at the incredible lack of balance among almost all of the folks involved.

And, because I enjoy bonfires, I’ll toss some gasoline on the broader discussion which I hope will serve as a bit of a backfire to the arrival of POUM and the complete implosion of this discussion into score-settling.

There is an issue with the role of bloggers in tacitly promoting things which are part and parcel of their real lives – of spinning what they write and present as ‘free commentary’ to suit the financial or political winds that may advantage them. But if we lift our heads and look around, we’ll see that these are part of a set of much bigger trends.The amateur nature of blogging up to now has been a significant part of its delight; we may well look back on this as the Golden Age, before Duncan Black and Oliver Willis rode partisan commentary to advocacy jobs, before Lauck and Van Beek slammed Daschle in their blogs while taking cash from Thune’s campaign, and before Kos got hired to make sure he didn’t defect to Clark.

But the downfall – if it happens – isn’t something that’s unique to blogging, no not at all.

Here are two articles that I hope will place the issues in a somewhat larger context. First, from this Sunday’s L.A. Times Magazine:

Swagland. It’s not a mythical over-the-rainbow realm, an Eastern European country, a theme park. You might call it a state of mind, a wondrous alternate universe concocted by publicists, funded by corporations eager for media coverage of their wares and frequented by journalists who have cast off concerns about conflicts of interest and embraced a new creed of conspicuous consumption.

In Swagland, the streets are paved with freebies, from promotional T-shirts, CDs and DVDs, to designer clothing, jewelry and perfume, to spa treatments, Broadway show tickets and suites in five-star hotels, to cellphones, laptops and luxury sports cars on loan. Travel writers accept free trips to exotic foreign lands. Automotive reviewers take junkets to Switzerland or the sun-dappled hills of Italy to drive the latest high-end roadsters. Entertainment hacks hobnob with stars and directors at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. High-tech audio and video reviewers max out their home-entertainment centers with LCD HDTV screens, surround-sound systems and five-digit turntables, which they keep for months at a time—for research purposes. Surfing journalists travel to remote South Pacific atolls and stay with supermodels on “floating Four Seasons” luxury cruisers where the champagne never stops flowing.

…

Some journalists steal swag outright from photo shoot sets or magazine fashion closets. “I’ve had editors call me up and say, ‘I have two fur coats here in a bag. I’m at 38th and 7th Avenue, right on the corner. If you can bring me X amount of dollars in cash, they’re yours,’ ” Valenti says. “I said to one editor, ‘What exactly are you going to say to the company?’ She said, ‘I’ll just send back the bag empty and blame it on the messenger.’ “

…

For publicists who practice giveaway marketing, however, such hand-wringing is futile, even a little comical. As far as they’re concerned, the battle’s already been won. The glittering utopia of Swagland is governed by one supreme precept, and Kelly Cutrone, founder of the firm People’s Revolution, sums it up: “Here’s the deal: Everything’s a commercial.”

And in the New York Times Magazine back in early December:

The thinking is that in a media universe that keeps fracturing into ever-finer segments, consumers are harder and harder to reach; some can use TiVo to block out ads or the TV’s remote control to click away from them, and the rest are simply too saturated with brand messages to absorb another pitch. So corporations frustrated at the apparent limits of “traditional” marketing are increasingly open to word-of-mouth marketing. One result is a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired “trendsetters” or “influencers” or “street teams” to execute “seeding programs,” “viral marketing,” “guerrilla marketing.” What were once fringe tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Marketers bicker among themselves about how these approaches differ, but to those of us on the receiving end, the distinctions might seem a little academic. They are all attempts, in one way or another, to break the fourth wall that used to separate the theater of commerce, persuasion and salesmanship from our actual day-to-day life. To take what may be the most infamous example, Sony Ericsson in 2002 hired 60 actors in 10 cities to accost strangers and ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event.

This idea — the commercialization of chitchat — resembles a scenario from a paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in which corporations have become so powerful that they can bribe whole armies of flunkies to infiltrate the family barbecue. That level of corporate influence sounds sure to spark outrage — another episode in the long history of mainstream distrust of commercial coercion and marketing trickery. Fear of unchecked corporate reach is what made people believe in the power of subliminal advertising and turn Vance Packard’s book “The Hidden Persuaders” into a best seller in the 1950’s; it is what gave birth to the consumer-rights movement of the 1970’s; and it is what alarms people about neuroscientists supposedly locating the “buy button” in our brains today. Quite naturally, many of us are wary of being manipulated by a big, scary, Orwellian “them.”

It’s stupid and blind to lay these issues at the moral failings of an individual – if such failings really come into play – or the moral blindness of the Left, the Right, or the Administration.

It’s just that we live in a world where the watchword is simple: “Everything’s a commercial”

As bloggers, we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that.