We live in extraordinary times. On 9-11, more than one observer, watching on television the Twin Towers collapse, in surreal slow-motion, in mushrooming clouds of concrete dust, later reported being struck by the thought that he or she had just witnessed, in real time, an event about which, thousands of years hence, Muslim mothers would tell bedtime stories to their small children. Like that, the Old Testament tale of the Tower of Babel must have been born.
And last week, in an incident quite devoid of that horror, of course, but somehow creepier, there was an anonymous Arab journalist abruptly rising to fling his shoes at the Leader of the Free World (“You dog!”), and there was President Bush ducking, then coming alertly erect again, with a look that said ‘Nice try!’ yet had in it a curious lack of surprise, as if the widely detested older son of George Herbert Walker Bush had known for years that, somewhere, some time, that shoe was coming.
Then — ‘This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!’ — the second shoe flew and Bush cringed sideways this time, while beside him a burly Prime Minister Maliki extended his right palm in at least a gesture of trying to protect his august guest’s head.
Both shoes were flung with force and considerable accuracy.
This was during a press conference in Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone; Mr Bush was there as part of his departing ‘victory lap’, to celebrate the ‘success’ of his Iraq adventure. (Which didn’t explain, of course, why Iraq was considered still so dangerous that the President’s trip was cloaked in secrecy.)
Quipped Bush later: “I didn’t know what the guy said but I saw his sole’ — a punning reference to his, well, soulful (and dead wrong, of course) assessment of Russia’s Putin, early in his presidency. “It was a Size 10,” Bush joked to the assembled journalists, while the shoe-thrower was hauled out of the room to be loudly beaten, the president’s supposedly great gifts to the Iraqi people, freedom and democracy, evidently not extending to the rule of law.
Now, as with Mr Bush’s startling tap dance before the White House press corps while awaiting a visit from McCain earlier this year, the President has increasingly demonstrated a hitherto unknown penchant for clowning. What’s been insufficiently remarked is the bad taste and downright creepiness of the clowning, with its reductio ad absurdum intent.
At the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in 2004, Bush mimed looking under the tables for the apocryphal Weapons of Mass Destruction which had been his administration’s fake rationale for invading Iraq. Most of the journalists in attendance laughed. It took an anonymous media advisory bulletin to point out sternly: “The problem is not that someone told a joke about WMD. It’s that as the chief purveyor of the WMD falsehood, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis [today, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis], it is beyond bad taste for George W. Bush to joke about WMD. It’s the difference between a comedian making a joke about O.J. Simpson looking for Nicole Brown Simpson’s ‘real killer,’ and O.J. Simpson making the same joke.”
Likewise, Mr Bush’s joking last week about the Iraqi shoe thrower was in fact an obscene toss at ignoring the pain of the widespread killing his administration had unleashed on Iraq. It was also to mock the courage of a man who (as the note the Iraqi journalist passed beforehand to a colleague showed) expected to be shot dead on the spot.
Wrote Robert Scheer (author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America) angrily in the San Francisco Chronicle last week: “They hate us for our shoes. Somewhere in what passes for the deeper regions of President Bush’s mind might come that reassuring giggle of a thought as he once again rationalizes away Iraqi ingratitude for the benevolence he has bestowed upon them. But the lame jokes no longer work… [We] have used much deadlier force than a shoe in the shock-and-awe invasion once celebrated in the American media as a means of building respect for democracy… These foreign adventures always start out so wonderfully: We will be greeted as liberators, democracy will flourish, the West will be safer, and instead we end up ever more scorned. The media travelling with Bush reported it as a victory of sorts that no reporters in Kabul threw shoes at our president during his press conference there. So much for lowered expectations.”
Scheer was at least forthright in his bitterness; by and large, both the US media and the late night comedians, usually reliable arbiters of the moral content of an incident, wound up hamstrung between the comic images of their President ducking like a clown at a fair and a kneejerk indignation at the thought of their presidency being scorned. Some took refuge in seriousness and scolding: Suppose one of those shoes had hit the President in, say, the eye? Others tried to derogate as primitive the Iraqis’ investiture of shoes with such symbolic contempt.
‘Hardball’s’ Chris Matthews, with two patient (and professional) Arab journalists on his show, abandoned four years of vocal opposition to a war he’d initially supported and demanded of them whether this was Iraqis’ gratitude for the 4,000 American lives lost “bringing democracy” to Iraq. (This particular rant — for it quickly became an ‘Ugly American’ rant — was cut from the repeat of ‘Hardball’ later that evening, though by then the harm had presumably been done to Matthews’ liberal reputation.) The throttled nature of US commentary added to the sense that, beyond the comedy, something big and somehow un-discussable had happened.
The Arab street had no doubt what that something was. There were large shoe-wielding demonstrations in Baghdad’s Sadr City that evening. Iraq’s Parliament descended into chaos as supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abandoned the business of the day to demand the jailed journalist’s immediate release. In Jordan lawmakers observed a minute’s silence in solidarity with the jailed reporter. A Saudi magnate offered $10 million for one of the shoes. Libya’s Khaddafi (strictly speaking, his daughter) announced an award in his name. A West Bank Palestinian patriarch offered him one of his daughters, “and her dowry.” And a Lebanese television channel offered him a job, with his salary backdated to “the second he threw the shoe.”
The furor put Maliki on the spot. With an election coming and anti-American fervour running so high, he cannot afford to be seen as simply Mr Bush’s puppet. (Given what one has gleaned of Maliki, this is probably the journalist’s best chance of surviving incarceration.)
The episode highlighted the depths to which America’s reputation in the world has fallen. If 9-11 presented the Bush administration with the defining challenge of its tenure, those thrown shoes demonstrated to the world the debased perversion they’d made of it. Not the least of President-elect Obama’s tasks will be to rescue the office he’s about to assume from the world’s resultant contempt.
