When Someone Throws a Shoe, it’s Time to Care
December 15, 2008 by Julia King
If nothing else, President George W. Bush is agile. When those shoes went flying at his head, he was smooth, even relaxed as he ducked not just once, but twice. He looked a bit surprised maybe, but generally in control, his famous smirk intact.
“I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it,” Bush said in the following minutes, brushing aside the Iraqi journalist’s actions as, “a way to get attention.” And with that attitude and those words, the outgoing president of the United States demonstrated yet again why he was unable to govern.
Not the least bit threatened? Not bothered? When a grown man is enraged to the point of throwing shoes, it behooves other men to take notice, to be bothered. I am reminded of President Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” refrain, the one that drew such mockery from the political Right, as though empathy is a weakness, a sham, or both.
Whether one believed in Bush’s Iraq war or not, there is little question that Iraqis have suffered during the occupation, lost more than most Americans can imagine. Yes, they suffered before we invaded their homeland; but it’s different to suffer at the hands of strangers than at the hands of countrymen. If you don’t believe that, go beat your neighbor’s kids and see how well that goes over.
Long ago, George W. Bush promised Compassionate Conservatism. Compassion is “sympathy for the suffering of others, often including a desire to help.” It was a great plan, this compassion, but one Bush was never fully qualified to carry out. He ducked and he smiled, he avoided the proverbial shoe; but he never learned how to care.
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Reading a BBC account of the shoe-throwing, and what an insult it is in the Muslim faith, it brought to mind an experience I had while visiting the Taj Mahal. It is not a mosque, but a tomb, but, I guess the rules are the same. There were these long rows of shelf-like compartments for your shoes and an attendant to take your shoes, keep them safe, for a few rupees. The memory was not of the strange-to-me rules of Muslim protocol (I had been hollered at days before while in a real mosque for not having my head covered by the scarf that I wore all the time while in Pakistan), but of how wonderfully cool the cold marble felt on the bottom of my feet…
Muntadar al-Zaidi took off his shoes – and did with them what many of us opposed to much of what Bush has done to all of us, but most horrifically, what he has done to the Iraqi people – he threw them. When he bravely took off his shoes, and threw them rather than checking them, his feet didn’t feel the wonderful coolness of marble… I was deeply disturbed to read in The New York Times the treatment he must have received out of sight of the cameras lens – he could be heard screaming in the other room. The screams that should be heard round the world as the deaf, and I dare say dumb (as in stupid), perpetrator smiled and ducked, again, from the responsibility of what he has wrought.
We see the sadness of the loss to American families that the war deaths of American soldiers engender. We feel the pain of war. Or do we? How many of us know of the best estimate of Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. Invasion? The number that uses the best international sources available presently stands at 1,297,997. (Antiwar.com) I am not certain I have the capacity to fathom that. Thank you for not letting the chuckles and the smirks be all there is, Julia. May we work at hearing the common human cry we have so ignored.