Unknown Flying Shoes

A shoe, flying across the room is of course not the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but is still a rather powerful and artistic image. Recent events just confirm that: different types of footwear has been aimed at politicians all over the globe and for all possible and impossible reasons. Probably the Iraqi shoe, that was inches away from George Bush in December 2008 made a deep impression on many people. In any case, we have to admit that the use of a shoe as a weapon in political struggle has become a tradition.

The most recent victim of shoe-throwers was the Israeli ambassador in Stockholm. On the 4th February, Swedish students threw a shoe and a couple of books in Benni Dagan. The ambassador read a lecture in the city university and was telling about the coming elections in the Knesset. Who could ever know — in a civilized country, north of Europe, in a university, the audience is acting like savage vikings.

Act I, scene 2: England, Cambridge, February 2nd. The head of the government of China, Wen Jiabo is talking to the audience from the university tribune. A shoe is flying towards him with the scream of the thrower “This is a scandal!”. It’s impossible to disagree, scandal indeed.

On the other side of the English Channel, in France, even teachers are using the “shoe” tactics to express their discontent. January 12th, in the city of Saint-Lô, they bombed the police with footwear, protesting against the educational reforms, that president Nicolas Sarkozy tried to pass. There were no victims.

USA, state Oregon, first week of January. In the city of Ashland, an owner of an art gallery opens a new amusement ride: for one dollar, you can throw either a shoe, sandal, or a sneaker in the portrait of the 43th president of the United States George Bush. Even now, it’s a popular place: new clients are coming, photographers sent new pictures to the newspapers.

And of course, the tradition to throw shoes in the portrait of Bush took deep roots quickly in the Middle East, literally a couple of days after the remarkable date of December 14th 2008. If someone yet doesn’t know, let me explain: that day, the Iraqi journalist Muntazir Al-Zaidi threw a shoe in the now former American president with the cry “This is a final kiss from the Iraqi people to you, dog! This is for all the widows, orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”.

The mass “smashing of Bush’s portraits with shoes” took place in December-January in Iraq (what was easy to predict), and also in Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Of course, the new anti-American actions in that region were supported with the older tradition of burning of the American flag. Shoes flew in photos of Bush in other parts of the world as well: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Greece, Spain, Pakistan, and India were just a few of them. Obviously, the same was happening in Iran.

Why Al-Zaidi threw a shoe in Bush isn’t that hard to understand, and bringing up the billionth time why Iraqis hate the USA is probably unnecessary. A man’s patience was blown up at the sight of someone he hated, this can happened to each of us. Why the flying shoes became the new vogue is also not a secret. In the era of global media the picture of Bush evading footwear was doomed for an extreme popularity from the beginning. And the availability of photos of Bush and the presence of shoes in the shops created an army of imitators.

Looking back at history, we can ask ourselves: what would Nikita Khrushchev, the well-known pioneer in this question? As known, in year 1960 the Soviet leader literally shook the UN tribune with his shoe, with pure emotions branding American imperialism and demanding the grant of independence to colonies.

Simply said, after half of a century, the symbol of struggle against American foreign policies is again a shoe. A truly heroic object. History tends to repeat itself.