I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon
Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock.
I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more pertinently, he was in Cambridge. It can’t have been nice in Cambridge on Monday. It wasn’t nice anywhere on Monday. Did he bring a spare shoe? Was he expecting the Chinese Premier to throw his shoe back? I don’t think so. It seems to me that he hadn’t properly thought his actions through.
And yet I’m a convert to shoe-throwing. There’s a power to it. For one thing, you do always, at first, have a shoe. That’s not something you could say about every informal projectile. Your rotten fruit, your elderly cabbage, both require a degree of furtiveness on the way in. You’ve got to smuggle. With your keys, the aerodynamics will be hard to predict. Coins are expensive, and a bit football terrace. Mobile phones, a bit Naomi Campbell. The shoe is the way to go.
They’ll ban shoes pretty soon. Not everywhere, obviously. That would be absurd. Just at public gatherings, when the mighty descend. That’ll be pretty bleak, won’t it? Lots of sock stories in diary columns. But everybody has shoes. Everybody can throw shoes. What else are they going to do? Do you reckon that’s how the trend kicked off in mosques? Too many fiery imams? No, probably not. I suppose the rule goes back to sandal days. You can’t get a decent swing with a sandal. No heft. Did you know, by the way, that the word for ‘sandal’ in Arabic is ‘sandal’? Neat, eh? I remember learning this at Sunday school. It’s the same in Hebrew. Persian root.
They erected a statue in honour of al-Zaidi in Tikrit the other day. It was a giant bronze shoe, the size of a sofa. I’m not making this up, I swear it. It had a bush coming out the top of it, too, which is probably a fantastic pun if English isn’t your first language. Or maybe ‘bush’ has a Persian root, too. I don’t know. It was in the garden of an orphanage for about two days last week, anyway, and then somebody came and took it away. CNN said so. We haven’t heard much about al-Zaidi in recent weeks, but over there he’s still a hero. Still in jail, too. He turned 30 a few weeks ago. CNN also said that the prison guards threw him a birthday party and sang him a song. Which was nice, considering.
The bloke from Cambridge was arrested for public order offences, and did his half-soggy perp-walk to the back of the van. Then they probably gave him a cup of tea and sent him home. He’ll be appearing before a magistrate next week. What’s he looking at, do you reckon? Community service? A fine? Surely nothing that’s going to stop him writing a column about it all in the Guardian. And I can’t help but think about what Laura Bush said, in her mad-as-a-horse, eye-rolling way, after that first shoe incident in Iraq. ‘In my view,’ she said, ‘in my view, it is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves.’
There were plenty who agreed with her. Politicians, newspaper editorials, columnists who should have known better. They said that the real message of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, and his shoe, was how much Iraq had changed. That you could throw a shoe, these days, and pretty much get away with it.
Only, al-Zaidi didn’t get away with it, did he? He was beaten and jailed, he’s still in jail two months later, and he might be looking at a sentence of up to 15 years. That’s why I’m still in two minds about shoe-throwing. It makes people snigger. It becomes a funny story, rather than a glaring example of what we are, and what Iraq’s still not.
It’s early days in the pending myth of the Great Snow of 2009 and the narrative isn’t yet entirely clear. One way or another, obviously, it’s going to be a source of great national shame. Only, how?
At the time of writing, the Blitz spirit line isn’t going to cut it. I jettisoned it as I walked through the City on Monday. Somebody had passed out near Bank station. A few of us helped him, but most people just weren’t interested. Everybody was too concerned about not falling over, not being cold, not being late. A friend from Wimbledon told me that there were people fighting over bread in his local Sainsbury’s. I’ve a hunch that mild disaster makes people nasty. Things have to get really bad before they get nice.
Health And Safety Gone Mad, by contrast, is a strong candidate. That one clicked when I finally got home. It is some rare feat of small-minded, Little Hitler dullardism to actually close parks when it snows, as Camden Council did. It takes arse-covering to an extraordinary degree to leave little old ladies to slip along icy pavements because you don’t have the balls to send out the buses, as Transport for London did.
I reckon the winner, though, will be Indolent Britain. I came up with that one when I was on the tube, and they told me they had closed the Waterloo and City line. For those of you who don’t live in London, that’s the one that has only two stations. It goes under the Thames. Snowing much under the Thames on Monday, do you think? Or were the drivers all back home, building snowmen in their gardens for their kids who couldn’t be bothered to go to schools in which teachers couldn’t be bothered to teach?
Yeah, Indolent Britain. You have wildcat strikes over the unreasonableness of employing cheap, foreign labour and simultaneously — simultaneously — half the native labour force decides to down tools and go sledging. Hey, I’m not judging. I read a story in the Times on Monday about a Bulgarian who has spent the last three months living in a Scottish shed, peeling potatoes. That was what got me into the office. Pure capitalist shame. Otherwise I’d probably have spent the day on the sofa, too.
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